Bioaugmentation and Biovalourization of Agro-Food and Beverage Industry Effluents

Abstract

Intensive agriculture has resulted in increased productivity. Every year there is a record increase in food production and huge surplus of various crops, e.g., cereals and tuber crops such as potato, cassava, sweet potato, sugar beet and sugarcane, etc., are produced and processed for value addition. Most of the starchy crops such as cassava, sweet potato and potato are perishable (Ray and Ward 2006) and enormous infra-structure is needed to store large quantities of such crops. In developing countries, due to poor infrastructure, post-harvest losses account for 25–30% of the total production owing to spoilage by bacteria, fungi and insect attack and hence it is becoming imperative to process these crops into value-added commodities. The food and beverage processing industry is growing fast the world over. These industries generate lots of solid waste and effluents, which are rich in nutrients and able to support growth of variety of microorganisms (Thassitou and Arvanitoyannis 2001). These effluents (wastewaters) if disposed untreated, add to the pollution problem. In view of the extensive contamination of the environment by persistent and toxic chemical pollutants originating from industrial wastewaters, it is imperative to develop cost-effective and efficient methods for their remediation. At present, an Ajmer, Rajasthan-305206 international trend promoting pollution prevention through cleaner production, which is based on the 5R policy (Fig. 5.1) namely reduction, replacement, reuse, recovery and recycling, is emerging (Olguín et al. 2004). Bioaugmentation is the popular and attractive technology that utilizes the metabolic potential of microorganisms to clean up the environment (Watanabe 2001; A. Singh et al. (eds.), Bioaugmentation, Biostimulation and Biocontrol, Soil Biology 28, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-19769-7_5, # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 85 Thassitou and Arvanitoyannis 2001). In the past, many types of treatment processes including physical, chemical and biological treatments have been recommended for wastewater treatment (Wilbey 2006), but they suffer from inherent shortcomings such as they are not fit for in situ application and may lead to formation of by-products, which further pose disposal problems. Furthermore, nearly all physical and chemical treatments are energy-intensive processes that cannot be afforded due to ecological fragility and sustainability. For organic wastewater disposal there is still a lot left to desire. It is because, in the past, treatment processes have ignored these wastes/effluents as potential feedstocks for useful microbial fermentations and prod-uct formation with notable exception of methane generation from municipal sludge. Most of the times, the waste treatment has been thought as a charge on society without a detailed examination of economical and ecological factors involved. Whatever primary (physical separation) treatment process is used, microbially decomposed biomass is a major product in food processing industry wastes. It can be utilized as organic fertilizer and animal feed (Ward et al. 2008), as feedstock for anaerobic digestion to methane and production of bioethanol (Ward et al. 2006). An excellent example of commercial possibilities comes from potato starch processing industry. For example, the Symba process based on using mixed culture of Candida utilis and Endomycopsis fibuligera produced a high quality single cell protein (SCP) Reuse