Potential of biowaste from the food industry as a biomass resource

The importance of biomass as a resource for energy production or as a chemical feedstock will increase significantly in the next decades. The amounts of biomass that can be used for non-food purposes however will be limited and its use will compete with other claims like food and feed production. In order to minimize such food-feed-fuel conflicts it is necessary to integrate all kinds of biowaste into a biomass economy. The food industry in particular might be a good candidate for assessment, since it produces inevitably large amounts of biogenic residues each year. The possibilities to use food processing residues for non-food purposes like bioenergy, biomaterial production, chemical feedstock or as animal feed are therefore discussed in more detail in this paper. It is shown that food processing residues represent a small but valuable biomass fraction that can be exploited in numerous ways. The most promising approach appears to be to design new microbial bioconversion processes as part of more complex biorefinery concepts.