Environmental assessment of complex wastewater valorisation by polyhydroxyalkanoates production

Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) are biodegradable polymers with renewable origin that are expected to substitute conventional petrochemical plastics. However, before they are commercialized, life-cycle environmental validation is needed, to prove that there is an actual benefit with the replacement of non-renewable plastics with PHA. Nowadays, environmental evaluations assessing bioplastics production at full-scale are scarce due to the lack of data, so experimental results were used to evaluate the feasibility of PHA production employing high load wastewater. A three-stage PHA production system utilising a mixed microbial culture (MMC) was successfully operated for two years employing complex wastewater from a fish-canning industry. The results obtained were scaled-up to define and compare a circular economy scenario performance, with PHA production, with the current linear approach (i.e. effluent generation, treatment and discharge). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the environmental performance of a MMC-based full-scale PHA production system using saline wastewater is evaluated. Results show an average improvement of ca. 25% for nine out of ten studied categories if the circular economy approach is implemented. The sludge management strategy was a key factor for the environmental validation of the process, and if composting is applied instead of anaerobic digestion, the improvement is reported in eight categories. When a more conservative replacement yield of fossil-based plastic was tested, the circular economy approach was the preferable option in 8 out of 10 categories. The significance of the downstream process was also confirmed by this study, although it was not a barrier to show the feasibility of producing added-value bioproducts under a circular economy approach. Finally, this work proposes new process integration strategies to reduce the environmental burdens of PHA production and increase the body of knowledge on MMC-based processes, an area where LCA case studies are still scarce.