Your Amazon Boxes Could Be Turned into Biofuel: A New Microorganism Munches on Cardboard to Create a Source of Energy.

BioChemicals/Renewable Chemicals, Feedstocks, Field/Orchard/Plantation Crops/Residues, Forestry/Wood/Residues/Waste, Not Agriculture, Process, R & D Focus, South Korea, Sustainability, University/College Programs

December 2, 2020

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by Mark Wilson (Fast Company) … The problem is that recycling centers, with so much excess cardboard, just toss the material into a dump. But what if we could do something else—anything else—with all these boxes? Like fuel a car? Thanks to Sun-Mi Lee, a research scientist at the Clean Energy Research Center of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, maybe we can. Her team has cultivated its own microorganism to transform used cardboard boxes into a substance that can be easily refined into biofuel.

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In the lab, Lee’s team bred its own yeast that could chew on cardboard to make the key component of biodiesel. How does it work? There are actually sugars trapped inside cardboard boxes—specifically glucose and xylose—and the yeast is able to transform those sugars into combustible fats used in biodiesel. Researchers have tried this approach before, but microorganisms were unable to process the xylose. Since about one-third of the sugar in cardboard is xylose, that left a lot of untapped energy.

Lee’s team cultivated yeast down a certain evolutionary path to create a microorganism that could turn all of the available sugars in cardboard into fats. And the yeast doesn’t just munch cardboard: It can process any common paper, as well as waste plant matter from farming and logging. In this sense, Lee’s approach to producing biodiesel is especially notable compared to how we currently make ethanol. Instead of using food to create energy, it uses waste. READ MORE

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