Society urgently needs to cope with increasing energy demands, extensive pollution concerns and most importantly resource scarcity (water, food) already predicted for the years to come. In order to become a more sustainable society, scientists have to embrace such urgent challenges in the 21st Century, coming up with suitable alternatives for the betterment of humankind. Waste valorisation, going well beyond traditional waste management practises, has the potential to become an alternative for the harvesting of valuable compounds (chemicals, materials, fuels, energy carriers), generating wealth from biowaste, circumventing at the same time environmental hazards and concerns such waste feedstocks have inherently associated.

This contribution is aimed to frame the waste-to-wealth concept as illustrated in a number of biowaste valorisation examples from sewage sludge to coffee waste grounds, slaughterhouse and construction waste as effective sources of valuable chemicals, biomaterials and biofuels.

About Prof. Luque

Rafael Luque (PhD in 2005 from the Universidad de Cordoba, Spain) has significant experience in biomass and waste valorization practices to materials, fuels and chemicals as well as nanoscale chemistry, green chemistry and catalysis (600+ publications, h-index 90, >37,000 citations, 7 patents, 10 edited books). He is Editor-in-chief of Molecular Catalysis (Elsevier) and serves on the Advisory/Editorial Board of over 10 Q1 RSC, Wiley, ACS and Elsevier journals. He has been named 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 Highly Cited Researcher (Clarivate Analytics).