Got Whey? Sustainability Endpoints for the Dairy Industry through Resource Biorecovery

Whey has applications in food, beverages, personal care products, pharmaceuticals, and the medical sector. However, it remains a massive dairy residue worldwide (160.7 million m³ year⁻¹), with high organic and nutrient loads. About 42% is used for low-value products such as animal feed and fertilizers or is even directly...

Got Whey? The significance of cheese whey at the confluence of dairying, environmental impacts, energy and resource biorecovery

Milk discovery and processing enabled human settling and thriving in various settings. The discovery of cheese led to the production of whey as dairy by-product. Although it can find application in food, beverages, personal care products, pharmaceuticals and medical treatment, cheese whey is a massive dairying residue world-wide (154 Mm3·y-1)...

Ecological Engineering of Acidogenic and Photoorganoheterotrophic Microbial Metabolisms to Valorise Cheese Whey

Green phototrophs such as microalgae and cyanobacteria have been proven to be able to perform photoorganoheterotrophic metabolism. The use of organic carbon can result in higher biomass production and increased concentrations of valuable compounds. Organic waste streams can serve for this purpose and lower the biomass production costs. Cheese...

Treatment of cheese whey by a cross-flow anaerobic membrane bioreactor: Biological and filtration performance

Whey, produced in large quantities during cheese production, is a rapidly fermentable high strength wastewater characterized by a high biodegradability and low alkalinity. In this study, a lab-scale cross-flow anaerobic membrane bioreactor was used to address the commonly experienced difficulties such as unstable reactor performance and...

Biological performance and sludge filterability of anaerobic membrane bioreactors under nitrogen limited and supplied conditions

The impact of nitrogen on biological performance and sludge filterability of anaerobic membrane bioreactors was investigated in two lab-scale cross-flow anaerobic membrane bioreactors that were fed with cheese whey at two different COD:TKN ratios (50 and 190). Nitrogen deprivation adversely affected the biological treatment performance and...

Treatment of industrial wastewaters by anaerobic membrane bioreactors: Implications of substrate characteristics

The success of anaerobic digestion relies on the presence of highly active methanogenic biomass, requiring effective retention of slow growing anaerobic microorganisms inside bioreactor by decoupling the hydraulic retention time (HRT) from solids residence time (SRT) or the employment of long SRTs in fully mixed systems. So far, flow through...