Sustainable Bioconversion of Industrial Wastes into Bacterial Cellulose for Diverse Applications: A Way Towards Pollution Control and Abatement

Socio-economic and environmental factors have led scientific community to find alternative approaches for management of agro-industrial wastes. An integrated approach, i.e., clean biotechnology, could be used for the conversion of agro-industrial wastes into industrial important and less toxic end products. Bacterial cellulose (BC) is an incredibly multifaceted biomaterial with desirable attributes including biodegradability, biocompatibility, great tensile strength, cellulose purity, and porosity. An economical BC production is difficult to owing to the cost of expensive synthetic media. By utilizing processed agro-industrial wastes as media substrate, a sustainable large-scale BC production can be achieved along with an effective waste management strategy. Various types of industrial wastes including crop residues, food industry by-products, distillery effluents, and kitchen wastes are used to produce BC. This review is centered on various aspects of cost-effective BC production using industrial wastes and a wide range of probable substrates with alternative methods for enhanced BC production. Novel applications involving BC in the field of environment, wound healing, drug delivery, dental treatment, etc., with an emphasis on new economic opportunities are also discussed. Overall, this study suggests that integrating different methods and techno-economic analysis would be advantageous to researchers in finding way for sustainable production of BC with reduced environmental pollution for diverse applications.