A pilot-scale sustainable biorefinery, integrating mushroom cultivation and in-situ pretreatment-cum-saccharification for ethanol production.

Biomass pretreatment incurs 40% of the overall cost of biorefinery operations. The usage of mushroom cultivation as a pretreatment/delignification technique, and bio-ethanol production from spent mushroom substrates, after subsequent pretreatment, saccharification and fermentation processes, have been reported earlier. However, the present pilot-scale, entirely-organic demonstration is one of the very first biorefinery models, which efficiently consolidates: biomass pretreatment; in-situ cellulase production and saccharification; mushroom cultivation, thereby improving the overall operational economy.