Bioprospecting the Environment for Organisms and Genes to Transform Food Waste into Bioenergy and Bioplastics

Every year Hong Kong generates 1.3 million tons of food waste and the majority of it is disposed of in landfills. Diverting food waste to landfills is problematic as such management practice is rapidly exhausting the valuable landfill spaces in Hong Kong. Therefore, the Hong Kong government has set forth a goal to reduce the total volume of municipal solid waste disposed of in landfills to less than 25% by 2014. More importantly, with climate change looming on the horizon and our desire for a sustainable future that is free of fossil fuels, there need to be a paradigm shift to no longer view organic waste materials as dead end products that require disposal. By coupling innovative advances in science and engineering, food waste is in fact a valuable biomass feedstock that can be transformed into value-added bioproducts.In response to the need to better manage the food waste problem in Hong Kong, the proposed research aims to use microbial consortia and state-of-the-art genome-enabled systems biology approaches to investigate the microbial processes that biotransform food waste into bioenergy and bioplastics. Specifically, we will prospect the vast and often unexplored biodiversity in the environment and screen microbial communities for the appropriate combination of organisms and genes that can yield a high concentration of bioenergy and bioplastics from food waste. Bioenergy in the forms of ethanol, butanol or methane and the biodegradable plastics polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) that can be produced from food waste are significant business and economic opportunities. The successful production of these renewable bioproducts will hinge on whether we can thoroughly understand the microbial reactions that are catalyzing the biotransformation and the proposed laboratory-scale research is positioned to query the population structures, dynamics, genetics, and physiology of the complex microbial consortia to gain a comprehensive system-level understanding. The research efforts to study the biotransformation of food waste will ultimately enable us to address both the sustainability and municipal solid waste challenges that Hong Kong faces.