Sunday, August 10, 2008
P41

Production of Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) using food waste as the carbon source

Peter H. Yu1, Hong Chua2, and Yujie Wang2. (1) Dept. of Applied Biology & Chemical Technology, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Hong Kong, (2) Civil and Structuring Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Hong Kong

Biodegradable plastics are new biomaterials for the replacement of traditional environmental-unfriendly plastics. Polyhydroxy-alkanoates (PHAs) are currently actively studied and developed to enhance their textural and physiochemical properties for plastic applications and to minimize their size-effects. However, the production cost of PHAs is not cost-effective that prohibits the wide commercialization of PHAs.  In this research project, food wastes such as tea waste, sugar cane waste, contaminated baked bread and candies were studied as carbon sources for the production of PHAs using the recombinant E.coli/pksC.  The long term objective is not only to produce biodegradable plastics at lower substrate costs but also to reduce the quantity of food wastes produced by food industry at the same time. This presentation reports the achievement of this study and the parameters necessary for the optimized production of copolymer P (HB-co-HV) by using these four types of food wastes.

 Key words: Polyhydroxyalkanoates, food industry waste, recombinant strain


See more of Poster Session 1
See more of Posters

See more of The Annual Meeting and Exhibition 2008 (August 10 - 14, 2008)