A life cycle assessment of early-stage enzyme manufacturing simulations from sustainable feedstocks.

Enzyme-catalyzed reactions have relatively small environmental footprints. However, enzyme manufacturing significantly impacts the environment through dependence on traditional feedstocks. With the objective of determining the environmental impacts of enzyme production, the sustainability potential of six cradle-to-gate enzyme manufacturing systems focusing on glucose, sea lettuce, acetate, straw, and phototrophic growth, was thoroughly evaluated. Human and ecosystem toxicity categories dominated the overall impacts. Sea lettuce, straw, or phototrophic growth reduces fermentation-based emissions by 51.0, 63.7, and 79.7%, respectively. Substituting glucose-rich media demonstrated great potential to reduce marine eutrophication, land use, and ozone depletion. Replacing organic nitrogen sources with inorganic ones could further lower these impacts. Location-specific differences in electricity result in a 14% and a 27% reduction in the carbon footprint for operation in Denmark compared to the US and China. Low-impact feedstocks can be competitive if they manage to achieve substrate utilization rates and productivity levels of conventional enzyme production processes.

Can biotechnology lead the way toward a sustainable pharmaceutical industry?

The impact-intensive and rapidly growing pharmaceutical industry must ensure its sustainability. This study reveals that environmental sustainability assessments have been conducted for only around 0.2% of pharmaceuticals, environmental impacts have significant variations among the assessed products, and different impact categories have not been consistently studied. Highly varied impacts require assessing more products to understand the industry's sustainability status. Reporting all impact categories will be crucial, especially when comparing production technologies. Biological production of (semi)synthetic pharmaceuticals could reduce their environmental costs, though the high impacts of biologically produced monoclonal antibodies should also be optimized. Considering the sustainability potential of biopharmaceuticals from economic, environmental, and social perspectives, collaboratively guiding their immense market growth would lead to the industry's sustainability transition.

Automating relative and absolute environmental sustainability assessments of bio-based products.

Awareness of long-term environmental challenges has motivated society toward a more sustainable future. Biotechnology is expected to contribute to the transition towards sustainability. Automation can play an important role in this transition, enabling faster decision-making at early stages. Therefore, an automated relative and absolute environmental sustainability assessment is presented to boost innovation in biotechnology. The automated calculation methodology uses computer-aided tools (dedicated software and Python codes) for the fast quantification of the environmental sustainability performance of bio-based products including scenario and uncertainty analysis. Two case studies (i) succinic acid (SA) and (ii) poly-lactic acid (PLA) are evaluated to test the capabilities of the automated assessment. The results show a carbon footprint and land use of 5.46 kg CO2 eq and 1.26 m2a crop eq for SA and 3.82 kg CO2 eq and 0.74 m2a crop eq for PLA. Transgression of planetary boundaries was found in both SA and PLA production.

Beet red food colourant can be produced more sustainably with engineered Yarrowia lipolytica.

Synthetic food colourants are widely used in the food industry, but consumer concerns about safety and sustainability are driving a need for natural food-colour alternatives. Betanin, which is extracted from red beetroots, is a commonly used natural red food colour. However, the betanin content of beetroot is very low (~0.2% wet weight), which means that the extraction of betanin is incredibly wasteful in terms of land use, processing costs and vegetable waste. Here we developed a sustainability-driven biotechnological process for producing red beet betalains, namely, betanin and its isomer isobetanin, by engineering the oleaginous yeast Yarrowia lipolytica. Metabolic engineering and fermentation optimization enabled production of 1,271 ± 141 mg l-1 betanin and 55 ± 7 mg l-1 isobetanin in 51 h using glucose as carbon source in controlled fed-batch fermentations. According to a life cycle assessment, at industrial scale (550 t yr-1), our fermentation process would require significantly less land, energy and resources compared with the traditional extraction of betanin from beetroot crops. Finally, we apply techno-economic assessment to show that betanin production by fermentation could be economically feasible in the existing market conditions.

Advances and opportunities in integrating economic and environmental performance of renewable products.

There is a growing global need to transition from a fossil-based to a bio-based economy to produce fuels, chemicals, food, and materials. In the specific context of industrial biotechnology, a successful transition toward a sustainable development requires not only steering investment toward a bioeconomy, but also responsibly introducing bio-based products with lower footprints and competitive market prices. A comprehensive sustainability assessment framework applied along various research stages to guide bio-based product development is urgently needed but currently missing. To support holistic approaches to strengthen the global bioeconomy, the present study discusses methodologies and provides perspectives on the successful integration of economic and environmental performance aspects to guide product innovation in biotechnology. Efforts on quantifying the economic and environmental performance of bio-based products are analyzed to highlight recent trends, challenges, and opportunities. We critically analyze methods to integrate Techno-Economic Assessment (TEA) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as example tools that can be used to broaden the scope of assessing biotechnology systems performance. We highlight the lack of social assessment aspects in existing frameworks. Data need for jointly applying TEA and LCA of succinic acid as example commodity chemical are assessed at various Technology readiness levels (TRLs) to illustrate the relevance of the level of integration and show the benefits of the use of combined assessments. The analysis confirms that the implementation of integrated TEA and LCA at lower TRLs will provide more freedom to improve bio-based product's sustainability performance. Consequently, optimizing the system across TRLs will guide sustainability-driven innovation in new biotechnologies transforming renewable feedstock into valuable bio-based products.

Computer-Aided Modeling, Simulation, and Exergy Analysis of Large-Scale Production of Magnetite (Fe3O4) Nanoparticles via Coprecipitation.

Magnetite nanoparticles present attractive properties including high magnetization, low toxicity, adsorption capacity, and simple preparation, making them efficient in water purification processes, soil remediation, and biomedical applications. In this sense, there is growing interest in the production of magnetite nanoparticles; therefore, evaluating the performance of this process on a large scale gives relevant information to process designers. In this work, the simulation and exergy analysis of large-scale production of magnetite nanoparticles via coprecipitation were performed using computer-aided tools. The process was modeled for the production of 807 t/year of magnetite nanoparticles; the data for the simulation were obtained from the literature, and experimental results were developed by the authors. The exergy efficiency of the process was estimated at 0.046%. The exergy of waste was estimated to be 105 313 MJ/h, while the unavoidable exergy losses were 2941 MJ/h. Washing 2 and 3 represented the most critical stages of the process, contributing 95.12% of the total irreversibilities due to the waste exergy, which corresponds to the water and ethanol exergy discarded in these stages. These results show that the process must be improved from the energy point of view and require the implementation of process optimization strategies to reach a more sustainable design.

Sustainable Design Approach for Modeling Bioprocesses from Laboratory toward Commercialization: Optimizing Chitosan Production.

Enhancing the biochemical supply chain towards sustainable development requires more efforts to boost technology innovation at early design phases and avoid delays in industrial biotechnology growth. Such a transformation requires a comprehensive step-wise procedure to guide bioprocess development from laboratory protocols to commercialization. This study introduces a process design framework to guide research and development (R&D) through this journey, bearing in mind the particular challenges of bioprocess modeling. The method combines sustainability assessment and process optimization based on process efficiency indicators, technical indicators, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), and process optimization via Water Regeneration Networks (WRN). Since many bioprocesses remain at low Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs), the process simulation module was examined in detail to account for uncertainties, providing strategies for successful guidance. The sustainability assessment was performed using the geometric mean-based sustainability footprint metric. A case study based on Chitosan production from shrimp exoskeletons was evaluated to demonstrate the method's applicability and its advantages in product optimization. An optimized scenario was generated through a WRN to improve water management, then compared with the case study. The results confirm the existence of a possible configuration with better sustainability performance for the optimized case with a sustainability footprint of 0.33, compared with the performance of the base case (1.00).