Abstract
To reduce food waste (FW) disposal costs, many Koreans now convert FW into residual food dried substances (RFDS) using a house-service food drying machine and then dispose of the RFDS. To recycle RFDS, we tested whether RFDS could be used as a culture nutrient to produce value-added microbial chemicals. As a case study, we attempted to produce lactic acid (LA) by cultivating lactic acid bacteria using RFDS. To prepare the culture medium for LA production, we finely ground the RFDS and dissolved it with CaCO3, a pH-controlling agent. Six lactic acid bacteria were tested to improve LA production, with Lactococcus lactis showing the highest LA production. To enhance LA production, three hydrolytic enzymes, amylase, protease, and lipase, were introduced separately or simultaneously into the RFDS medium during the cultivation of the L. lactis strain. The addition of amylase alone was the most effective in increasing LA production. We then investigated the effect of the RFDS concentration on LA production. The highest LA production was achieved when 100 g/L of RFDS was used. LA production was scaled up using a 5 L bioreactor. During the fermentation, LA production improved to 46.32 g/L, which was 1.73-fold higher than that (26.83 g/L) obtained from the flask culture. These results show that RFDS from FW can be used as a culture nutrient to produce LA. Our study provides a new and simple FW recycling method and lays the foundation for expanding the usability of FW.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data Availability
Data are available on request.
References
Tsang, Y. F., et al. (2019). Production of bioplastic through food waste valorization. Environment International, 127, 625–644.
Paritosh, K., et al. (2017). Food waste to energy: An overview of sustainable approaches for food waste management and nutrient recycling. BioMed Research International, 2017, 2370927.
Yu, I. K. M., et al. (2017). Valorization of starchy, cellulosic, and sugary food waste into hydroxymethylfurfural by one-pot catalysis. Chemosphere, 184, 1099–1107.
Venkata, M. S., et al. (2018). Waste derived bioeconomy in India: a perspective. New Biotechnology, 40, 60–69.
Yankov, D. (2022). Fermentative lactic acid production from lignocellulosic feedstocks: from source to purified product. Frontiers in Chemistry, 10, 823005.
Huang, S., et al. (2021). A review of the recent developments in the bioproduction of polylactic acid and its precursors optically pure lactic acids. Molecules, 26(21), 6446.
Tian, X., et al. (2021). Recent advances in lactic acid production by lactic acid bacteria. Applied Biochemistry and Biotechnology, 193(12), 4151–4171.
Moon, H. C., & Song, I. S. (2011). Enzymatic hydrolysis of food waste and methane production using UASB bioreactor. International Journal of Green Energy, 8(3), 361–371.
Owusu-Agyeman, I., et al. (2021). Co-fermentation of municipal waste streams: Effects of pretreatment methods on volatile fatty acids production. Biomass and Bioenergy, 145, 105950.
Habashy, M. M., et al. (2021). Food waste: A promising source of sustainable biohydrogen fuel. Trends in Biotechnology, 39(12), 1274–1288.
Zhang, L., et al. (2020). Acidogenic fermentation of food waste for production of volatile fatty acids: Bacterial community analysis and semi-continuous operation. Waste Management, 109, 75–84.
Song, L., et al. (2022). Microbial production of lactic acid from food waste: Latest advances, limits, and perspectives. Bioresource Technology, 345, 126052.
Funding
This work was supported in part by the R&D programs of MOTIE/KEIT (20018375), KRICT (SS2242-10, BSF22-515), and Ulsan-KRICT (US22-03).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
Chaeyeon Cho: investigation, validation, data curation, writing–original draft. Gyeong Tae Eom: conceptualization, project administration, supervision, writing–original draft, writing–review and editing, funding acquisition, resources.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Ethical Approval
Not applicable.
Consent to Participate
Not applicable.
Consent for Publication
Not applicable.
Competing Interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Cho, C., Eom, G.T. Improving the Utilization of Food Waste: Conversion of Food Waste into Residual Food Dried Substance and Use of This Material as a Culture Nutrient for Microbial Production of Lactic Acid. Appl Biochem Biotechnol 195, 2965–2973 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12010-022-04247-2
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12010-022-04247-2