New Agro-Industrial Wastes as Feedstock for Lactic Acid Production
A special issue of Fermentation (ISSN 2311-5637). This special issue belongs to the section "Industrial Fermentation".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 August 2023) | Viewed by 18275
Special Issue Editors
Interests: lignocellulose; biorefinery processing; pretreatment; biodetoxification; cellulosic ethanol; cellulosic lactic acid; cellulosic amino acid
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Since the first analysis of sour milk by the Swedish chemist C.W. Scheele in the 1780s, lactic acid (2-hydroxypropanoic acid) has been widely applied in the food, animal feed, cosmetics, medicines, and materials industries. For environmentally friendly biodegradable polymers applications, polylactic acid (PLA) is a superstar product that replaces petrochemical polymers, such as polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polystyrene, and polyester. The sharp increase in PLA consequently stimulates the demand for its monomer chemicals, namely chiral lactic acids (L-lactic acid and D-lactic acid). The global lactic acid market was valued at USD 2.6 billion in 2018, and is expected to grow at ~20% annually to be ~USD 9 billion in 2025.
Currently, all lactic acid is produced by microbial fermentation using starch or sugar as feedstocks. With the fast market expansion of PLA, maintaining feedstock production is a considerable challenge. Starch or sugar feedstocks are certainly not sufficient to meet the ever-growing need for lactic acid production as a PLA monomer because most starch and sugar are used as human food or animal feed. It is crucially important to find alternative feedstocks as carbon (sugar) sources for the future large-scale industrial production of lactic acid. The feedstock should be sufficiently abundant, easily available, low-cost, renewable, and from non-food sources
The aim of this Special Issue entitled “New Agro-Industrial Wastes as Feedstock for Lactic Acid Production” is to publish the cutting-edge research on using agro-industrial waste biomass for the production of lactic acid, especially the production of chiral lactic acids (L-lactic acid and D-lactic acid) with the potential to be used as monomer chemicals of PLA. Agro-industrial wastes include crops residues (corn stover, wheat straw, rice straw, sugarcane bagasse, etc.), forest residues (wood sawdust, etc.), energy plants (switch grass, empty palm bunches, etc.), as well as industrial biomass wastes (corncob residue from xylose extraction, corn fibers, DDGS, fruit residues, etc.), but exclude pure sugars from sugarcane, sugar beets, sweet sorghum, and starch from corn, wheat, rice, barley, sweet potato, potato, and other starch-based crops. The research scopes covered in this Special Issue include, but are not limited to, biorefinery conversion, fermentation, microbial cell factory, purification and valorization, and novel process platform technology aiming at lactic acid production, as well as techno-economic and carbon-neutral evaluations.
The submission window for the Special Issue opens from March 1, 2023, to Aug 31, 2023.
We are looking forward to having you participate in this gathering of excellent research from the field of lactic acid.
Prof. Dr. Jie Bao
Dr. Bin Zhang
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- chiral lactic acid
- agro-industrial wastes
- biorefinery processing
- fermentation
- microbial strains
- techno-economic and carbon-neutral evaluation
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