Residual biomasses at scale: Ensuring future bioeconomy uses outperform current baseline.

To shift towards low-fossil carbon economies, making more out of residual biomass is increasingly promoted. Yet, it remains unclear if implementing advanced technologies to reuse these streams really achieves net environmental benefits compared to current management practices. By integrating spatially-explicit resource flow analysis, consequential life cycle assessment (LCA), and uncertainty analysis, we propose a single framework to quantify the residual biomass environmental baseline of a territory, and apply it to the case of France.

Ruminations on sustainable and safe food: Championing for open symbiotic cultures ensuring resource efficiency, eco-sustainability and affordability.

Microbes are powerful upgraders, able to convert simple substrates to nutritional metabolites at rates and yields surpassing those of higher organisms by a factor of 2 to 10. A summary table highlights the superior efficiencies of a whole array of microbes compared to conventionally farmed animals and insects, converting nitrogen and organics to food and feed. Aiming at the most resource-efficient class of microbial proteins, deploying the power of open microbial communities, coined here as 'symbiotic microbiomes' is promising.

Upgrading agrifood co-products via solid fermentation yields environmental benefits under specific conditions only.

Transforming residual biomass into edible ingredients is increasingly promoted to alleviate the environmental impacts of food systems. Yet, these approaches mostly rely on emerging technologies and constrained resources, and their environmental benefits remain unclear. By combining process-based consequential life cycle analysis, uncertainty assessment and biomass resource estimation, we quantified the impacts of deploying waste-to-nutrition pathways, here applied to the upgrading of agrifood co-products by solid-state fermentation (SSF).

Waste-to-nutrition: a review of current and emerging conversion pathways.

Residual biomass is acknowledged as a key sustainable feedstock for the transition towards circular and low fossil carbon economies to supply whether energy, chemical, material and food products or services. The latter is receiving increasing attention, in particular in the perspective of decoupling nutrition from arable land demand. In order to provide a comprehensive overview of the technical possibilities to convert residual biomasses into edible ingredients, we reviewed over 950 scientific and industrial records documenting existing and emerging waste-to-nutrition pathways, involving over 150 different feedstocks here grouped under 10 umbrella categories: (i) wood-related residual biomass, (ii) primary crop residues, (iii) manure, (iv) food waste, (v) sludge and wastewater, (vi) green residual biomass, (vii) slaughterhouse by-products, (viii) agrifood co-products, (ix) C gases and (x) others.