Review - New prospect of algae for sustainable production of lactic acid: Opportunities and challenges

Abstract

Heavily dependent on fossil fuels has resulted in severe environmental impacts such as exhaustion of natural resources, contamination of the environment, and excessive greenhouse emission. Therefore, intensive research works to explore alternative and sustainable energy sources has been escalated in recent years. In this regard, algae have been exploited as the third-generation of biomass to produce biofuels and biochemicals. Nevertheless, research to produce lactic acid from algae is still limited in the literature. Hence, this review is aimed to provide an extensive mechanism of deriving lactic acid from algae biomass, started with the discussion of the types of algae, the involvement of other microorganisms, fermentation technology, as well as the bottleneck of the technology. The evolution of different biomass feedstocks for lactic acid production is addressed in the initial section of this paper, followed by a discussion on the perspective of novel cascading algae biorefinery systems to truly reveal the potential of algae-based lactic acid production in a sustainable manner.