The Future is Garbage: Repurposing of Food Waste to an Integrated Biorefinery

Globally, 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted annually, with few uses other than landfilling, anaerobic digestion, or composting. Food waste (FW) repurposing provides an alternative waste management strategy toward meeting goal 12 of the United Nations sustainable development goals. Here, we present an integrated biorefinery technology, repurposing potato peel waste (PPW) for manufacturing multiple biobased value-added products. We report an integrated biorefinery comprising three stepwise processes: ultrasonic extraction to recover extractives for high activity antioxidants’ production, optimized hydrolysis and dehydration of glucose resulting in the highest reported yields (54%) of 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), directly from potato peels, for manufacturing biobased chemical precursors, and finally, pyrolysis of the residual lignin into biochar for remediating pesticide contaminated water, improving water quality. As a best-case scenario, we obtain revenues of about $6300 per MT of dry PPW. This provides the opportunity for successful translation of our technology to an economically profitable process using zero value food waste. This study provides a sustainable valorization blueprint that can be extended to other types of FW for improving the economics of biomass-based biorefineries by manufacturing multiple renewable products.