Newton Bhabha Industrial Waste: Valorising Waste from Sugar Cane Industries via Innovations in Pretreatment, Biotransformation and Intensification

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The sugar cane industry is the second-largest agro-based industry in India and supports approximately 60 million farmers and their families. The sugarcane and associated industry however produces more than100 million tons (MT) of solid and liquid wastes every year (~80 MT of bagasse, ~10 MT of press mud, 45 billion litres of spent wash, bagasse pitch and ~25 MT of cane trash). Part of the bagasse is used to generate power by burning it in boilers. The huge quantities of wastes produced by sugar and associated industries pose a significant challenge as well as an opportunity. The vWa project is aimed at harnessing UK expertise on transforming waste biomass to energy and chemicals for providing technological solutions to address problem of waste generated by sugar and associated industries in India. Two leading bioenergy companies in UK (Nova Pangaea Technologies and Green Fuels Research) are collaborating with three UK universities (Queen's University Belfast, Cranfield University and Nottingham University) to develop appropriate solutions for transforming five major waste streams (bagasse, press mud, spent wash, bagasse pith and sugar cane trash) to transportation fuels (bio-CNG and butanol) and chemicals (succinic and lactic acid). The UK consortium has identified relevant Indian partners which include an apex R & D organisation of sugar mills, Vasantdada Sugar Institute (which has 146 sugar mills and 74 distilleries as their members), two large sugar mills (Dhampur and Lokmangal), a start-up focussed on pre-treatment (Vivira) along with three Indian research Institute (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay & Delhi and Indian Institute of Petroleum). The vWa consortium will address the key challenges in valorisation of a lignocellulosic biomass (LCB) namely development of a cost effective pre-treatment method (combination of cavitation, thermal and biological) to improve digestibility of biomass, transformation of treated biomass to fermentable sugar (after detoxification) and transformation of the sugars to products. Most of the past and ongoing efforts focus on pre-treatment for recovering cellulose from LCB and then converting it to sugars and other value added products. These approaches suffer from high costs associated to pre-treatment. In this project, we aim to develop and commercialise technologies for transforming five waste streams mentioned above to transportation fuels (bioCNG and biobutanol [BB]), and two value added chemicals (succinic acid [SA] and lactic acid [LA]). The key innovation lies in hybrid pre-treatment methods: thermal process (developed by Nova), hydrodynamic cavitation (developed by PI, Vivira) and anaerobic digestion (AD). The AD will be used for the first time to selectively convert hemi-cellulose to biogas and retain cellulose in the digestate which will be converted to sugars. Lignin from the digestate will be separated from the residue and may be sold as a by-product for further valorisation. The sugars obtained from digestate will be subjected to microbial fermentation to manufacture BB, SA and LA. The process conditions and strategies will be optimized and intensified & modular processes will be developed to obtain BB, SA and LA of desired purity from the fermentation broth. The proposed approach and aimed solutions will realise a step change in the state of the art. The developed solutions will be demonstrated on pilot and field scales wherever possible. These demonstrations and industry connect of the consortium partners will be used to facilitate commercialisation of developed technologies. The developed solutions will make tangible difference in productivity of sugar cane industries in India and will therefore have significant beneficial impact on wellbeing of large population in rural India.