BioTransformation of Agricultural Waste and By-Products. The Food, Feed, Fibre, Fuel (4F) Economy.

4F (Food, Feed, Fibre, Fuel) economy and sustainable growth are top topics either in Europe and around the world. There is a need to exploit all the added value in the present productions and to unravel new markets and technologies for the future days. An important topic in plant biotechnology showing good prospective and economy potential is the exploitation of plants with modified cell walls for improved processes and industries, to be applied also to biofuel production. This book presents an evaluation on plant species better exploitable for a particular transformation. Crops are already covering large parts of cultivable soils so it is not conceivable to try to extend the cultures beyond the limit of available soils. A further increase in productivity is also difficult to obtain. Agriculture for food products covers the largest part of crop productions, while feeds represent the second largest market. A smaller part is devoted to production of crops for biofuel. Life cycle assessment and CO2 Footprint assessment evaluate the production processes as sustainable or not. Transport on the small distance (within 100 km), and through shipment transfer, are the most economic mean to deliver the waste and by-products. Nowadays the food industry residues are recycled by composting and by biomass incorporation in the soil, to sustain farmyard manure and fertilisers, in order to increase the organic matter in the soil. Composting is presently the most used method for waste treatment, the largest applicative transformation in management of differentiated wastes. However, there is a need to be digest enzymatically complex fibre-rich polysaccharides to obtain simple sugars suitable for biofermentations. Further advances in technology and plants design are supporting the exploitation and valorisation of vegetable and fruit by-products through fermentation (feed-batch liquid fermentation, solid state fermentation) in Bio-Based Bio-chemicals production. The need to substitute the decreased reserves of petroleum with chemicals from fermentative processes and the request for an increase in crop yields pose new challenges to the scientists in Europe and in the world. New production systems on an industrial scale exploit tobacco plants (seeds) for biofuel while the residual proteins are processed as feeds for livestock.