Global challenges related to water, energy, resources, and environment pollution have become unrelenting with increasing global population and people moving from simple subsistence living to advanced industrial economies. Biotechnology is one of the key technologies for the management and up-cycling of organic wastes including wastewater and some industrial effluents. When biotechnology is coupled to other forms of technology, the types of treatable waste stream and resources/energy recovered become manifold, presenting holistic solutions to address current environmental issues.

At the core of biotechnology is the tiny microbe, which represents the simplest functional unit of life on Earth. Yet, the underlying microbiome, metabolism, including microbial synergy and competition of many widely-applied biotechnologies, are largely considered a black box. Through unravelling this intricate web of intra- and intercellular mechanisms, we could better exploit microbes' specialized functions for the development of sustainable and green technologies.

This presentation will describe how a multi-pronged and cross-disciplinary approach, comprising of thermodynamics, meta-omics, and engineering design, can be employed to study, prototype and advance waste-to-energy and waste-to-resource technologies. Specifically, new research directions and findings pertaining to anaerobic digestion for energy formation and microbial biopolymer polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) production will be presented. The translation of these scientific findings into practical applications and how these biotechnologies can be interfaced with other non-biological technologies to create waste management solutions would also be discussed and demonstrated.