Newton Bhabha Industrial Waste: Integrated biorefinery for converting paper mill waste into chemical wealth (waste-2-wealth)

India is the fastest growing paper market in the world (6% per annum; by 2024-25 Indian demand is projected to increase to 23.50 million MT). However, alongside this trend is the huge amount of industrial waste, especially lignocellulosic material that accumulates as part of this expanding industry. This proposal addresses a number of urgent problems relevant to India, including a) a strengthening of the countries economic position through the emerging bioeconomy, b) the need to tackle major and growing environmental waste management challenges and c) addressing countrywide poverty prevalence through new employment. Our team will develop an innovative biorefinery and commercial strategy to establish a demonstrator platform for the sustainable conversion of paper mill waste into high value chemicals. This platform will be used to drive sustainable expansion through commercial inward investment. This technology will lead to reduction in industrial waste/pollution, and improve value recovery from waste in the paper and pulp industry sector. The proposal will strengthen India's economic position, address major waste challenges and tackle rural poverty. The biorefinery is built from partner expertise in i) valorisation of waste feedstock (India); ii) use of bioengineered strains for fragrance production at industrial levels, and feedstock utilisation (UK); iii) commercial expertise in this market sector (UK/India). The innovation is found in unifying existing technologies to form the biorefinery concept, enabling distributed, green, scalable and sustainable manufacture of chemicals from major paper mill waste streams. The biorefinery will drive inward investment to strengthen India's economic position, address major waste challenges and tackle poverty prevalence through job creation.

This project will develop sustainable, scalable and cost-effective metabolic engineering routes to chemicals manufacture. It will do this using waste feedstocks that are widely available, both in India and in other LMICs, using metabolic engineered microbial strains. The beneficiaries of the research programme are those in the academic scientific community, especially those engaged in the bioengineering of microbial strains in the IBBE sector and scientists in the bioprocessing/fermentation sectors. Industrial colleagues developing robust hosts for industrial applications for IBBE sector applications will also benefit, especially where scale up costs and ease of process operability are major concerns. On the longer term, the chemicals manufacturing sector will benefit from the delivery of fermentation processes for products for which there are established markets and this will also have major societal benefits (wealth creation; rural employment; environmental benefits).

There are major beneficiaries in the conversion of waste streams (e.g. mill waste) to higher value products / fuels and for the remediation of other biomass (e.g. algal biomass, the control of which is a major problem for many industrial sectors). The motivation is to i) increase capacity in chemicals manufacturing supply with low carbon footprint whilst ii) provide sustainable routes to production, implemented at low capital cost and iii) deliver this vision without reliance on major transport infrastructures. This can be provided through the integrated biorefinery concept that we propose. The technology developed will therefore provide solutions to the multi-faceted challenges of future materials / chemicals supply in developing economies where the utilisation of waste streams can add significant value to manufacturing workflows.

The project will train a new generation of scientists not constrained by discipline boundaries who can bring synthetic biology approaches, bioprocessing and thermocatalytic methods of feedstock degradation together to address grand challenges relating to chemicals manufacture, strategy and implementation. These scientists will be equipped to work seamlessly across disciplines and with collaborating international centres. The project is an innovative science programme led by the economic and social needs of developing countries (in this case India), in partnership with industry, government policy makers, as well as consumers. Project scientists and associated staff will work with experts in Responsible Research Innovation based in the SYNBIOCHEM Centre and Indian NGOs / government groups to ensure that manufacturing practices are informed, ethical and that they satisfy regulatory aspects. This will require input from real-time assessment and anticipation of research and innovation trajectories, deliberation and reflection, and collaborative development.

The project maps strongly into RCUK priority challenge themes and in particular the India waste challenge call. It recognises the need to integrate approaches in biomolecular engineering into wider manufacturing programmes, which is a major driver for the burgeoning bioeconomy.