Ethanol Production from Enzymatically Treated Dried Food Waste Using Enzymes Produced On-Site

Leonidas Matsakas and Paul Christakopoulos
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Leonidas Matsakas: Biochemical Process Engineering, Division of Chemical Engineering, Department of Civil, Environmental and Natural Resources Engineering, Luleå University of Technology, Luleå SE-971 87, Sweden
Paul Christakopoulos: Biochemical Process Engineering, Division of Chemical Engineering, Department of Civil, Environmental and Natural Resources Engineering, Luleå University of Technology, Luleå SE-971 87, Sweden

Sustainability, 2015, vol. 7, issue 2, 1-13

Abstract: The environmental crisis and the need to find renewable fuel alternatives have made production of biofuels an important priority. At the same time, the increasing production of food waste is an important environmental issue. For this reason, production of ethanol from food waste is an interesting approach. Volumes of food waste are reduced and ethanol production does not compete with food production. In this work, we evaluated the possibility of using source-separated household food waste for the production of ethanol. To minimize the cost of ethanol production, the hydrolytic enzymes that are necessary for cellulose hydrolysis were produced in-house using the thermophillic fungus Myceliophthora thermophila . At the initial stage of the study, production of these thermophilic enzymes was studied and optimized, resulting in an activity of 0.28 FPU/mL in the extracellular broth. These enzymes were used to saccharify household food waste at a high dry material consistency of 30% w/ w , followed by fermentation. Ethanol production reached 19.27 g/L with a volumetric productivity of 0.92 g/L·h, whereas only 5.98 g/L of ethanol was produced with a volumetric productivity of 0.28 g/L·h when no enzymatic saccharification was used.

Keywords: household food waste; Myceliophthora thermophila; thermophilic enzymes; in house enzyme production; enzymatic saccharification; Saccharomyces cerevisiae; ethanol (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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