Chapter 20 - Platform Chemical Biorefinery and Agroindustrial Waste Management

Abstract

The major advantages of using agrowaste as a biofeedstock are that it achieves the twin objectives of waste management and the production of valuable platform chemicals from cheap and easily available precursors. From an environmental perspective, the production of commercially valuable products from agricultural waste acts as an incentive for the industry to participate in structured and efficient waste management programs. Current waste management methods are constricted by flawed policies that do not take into account regional variations and are inflexible to local requirements. There has been a huge emphasis on the utilization of agricultural waste materials toward the production of energy, including both the direct use as fuel, as in the case of rice husk, and the extraction of bioethanol from corn stover. As such, the utilization of agricultural wastes, which contain many complex and valuable chemicals only for energy generation, results in the underrealization of the economic potential of agricultural wastes. The preponderance of using agricultural wastes for energy production stems from the easy availability of technologies that enable the use of agricultural wastes and fuel and an increased awareness among the general public and the scientific community. On the contrary, the utilization of agricultural wastes to produce platform chemicals has not gained significant interest in the industry. This is due to a combination of economic and technological reasons. Despite this general scenario, commodity chemicals such as glutamic acid, citric acid, etc. are being synthesized from agroindustrial feedstock. This chapter focuses on the concept of using agricultural wastes and easily available algae for the production of biofuels and various value-added chemicals and the emerging technologies used to achieve this transformation.