Biocatalytic valorisation of flower waste: Towards sustainable feedstock for fine chemical industry

Did you know countries like India produce more than 300 kilotons of flower waste every day? Imagine re-using the flower waste to make high value starting materials for the chemical industry!
With an increasing awareness about resource use and government regulation, chemical industries are fast realising the need for sustainable manufacturing. Identifying sustainable alternatives for petrochemical feedstock (like biomass) and using resource efficient technologies (to replace the conventional batch reactor) are two strategies which are fast gaining research and industry attention to enable sustainable production of chemicals.
In this two-fold objective project we will: (i) demonstrate for the first time the potential of Streptomyces sp. as a biocatalyst for valorisation of flower waste into high value chemicals and (ii) investigate process scale-up in continuous reactors.
The first part of this project will first focus on investigating the reaction mechanism for biocatalytic conversion of terpene alcohols derived from flower waste. This involves identifying the right reaction conditions to maximise the product yield on the bench scale. This reaction will be carried out using both free and immobilised Streptomyces sp. The second part of the project involves applying the reaction protocol developed in the first stage to demonstrate scale-up in micro-channel (MC) and spinning disc reactors (SDR). These reactor configurations are fast gaining industry attention for their ability to achieve fast reactions due to increased mass transfer, small chemical inventory, scalability and inherent safety. This project for the first time will test the potential of the MC and SDR for whole cell catalysed reaction systems.