Waste to Wealth- Value Recovery from Agro-food Processing Wastes Using Biotechnology: A Review

From creation, man was charged to ‘increase, multiply, and subdue the earth’. Thus, man has continually sought to improve the quality of life by transforming nature to provide more food, and better living conditions for long life. Agriculture and technology are part of the tools used to accomplish this transformation and to achieve many of man’s goals. Through mechanization and other tools of modern technology man cultivates crops and rears animals for his food needs, processes same through industrial activities for value addition, and carries out other sundry activities- all in a bid to dominate his environment. Major fallout of all these is the generation of wastes, with their attendant implications for the environment generally. Generation of wastes demands that measures must be taken to manage them if the unpleasant consequences of their accumulation (and these are legions) must be averted. Hence, various waste management options have been adopted over time, most of which had tended to see waste as useless entity that must be disposed off wholesomely. However, modern concepts of waste management tend to see waste from a different perspective, since what is regarded as waste may not be truly totally so, at least, from the point of view of salvageable resources entrapped therein. This is particularly so for agro-food wastes in which reasonable percentage of biomass form major part of what is often considered as wastes consigned to the waste bins. Fortunately, the entrapped resources are bioconvertible into useful products: animal foods and feeds, biofertilizers, industrial chemicals/raw materials, biofuels, biogas and other energy renewable alternatives, etc. With respect to these, the role of biotechnology, in resource exploitation can hardly be overstated. Thus, this paper explores wastes as a veritable resource for wealth creation, with particular focus on resources recoverable from agro-food wastes using the tool of biotechnology.