Recycling of food waste into chemical building blocks

Enormous quantities of food waste (FW) arise from global production. Roughly, one third of all food for human consumption is wasted resulting in huge costs to the world economy alongside significant environmental problems. FW is a potential reservoir of functionalized molecules, i.e. carbohydrates, proteins and lipids that can be recovered, concentrated and transformed into high value products. Conversion of renewable carbon from FW to building block chemicals can also more profitable than conventional processing methods. Recent studies have used microbial routes to recover value from FW into a number of chemical building blocks. Recycling FW into valuable chemicals directly contributes to the transition from current fossil fuel-based economies to a bioeconomy and reduced waste society. This paper reviews the potential for using FW and focuses on recent updates in second-generation valorisation methods where the bioproduction of chemical building blocks uses FW as a feedstock.