Waste is resources that cannot be extracted economically

Our lab focuses on developing market-competitive strategies to recover these resources from organic waste by engineering natural and synthetic microbiomes.

In the last century, utilizing fossil-based materials has provided us with abundant food, efficient manufacturing, and convenient transportation. As byproducts, large amounts of waste are generated from industrial, agricultural, and household activities. The organic fraction of waste, including food waste, wastewater, sewage sludge, animal manure, paper and pulp waste is broken down to carbon dioxide, methane, and inorganic nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur during various treatment and disposal processes. While this linear extraction –> manufacturing –> consumption –> waste disposal approach is cost-effective in protecting human and environmental health under existing infrastructure, it also results in high demands in land use, high energy consumption, unintended environmental consequences, and severe climate implications that have become too costly to ignore.

These organic “byproducts”, in fact, are rich reservoirs of energy and useful materials that can be valorized for beneficial use to replace their fossil-based counterparts. They include organic carbons, like carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids, and inorganic nutrients, such as ammonia and phosphate. Although technologies exist to convert them into useful forms and extract them, the challenge is in their financial and environmental sustainability. For example, anaerobic digestion can produce biogas (carbon dioxide and methane) for heating and electricity generation from organic carbon. The process is often too costly to build and maintain, yet the product, biogas, is too low in value to make financial sense for most users.