Sustainable Bioprocess Engineering: Improving Efficiency From Laboratory to Industrial Scale

Abstract

Biological conversion can appear highly promising at laboratory scale while remaining technically unstable, resource intensive, or economically uncompetitive when transferred to industrial production. Scale changes mixing, oxygen transfer, heat removal, concentration gradients, contamination risk, instrumentation, and downstream-processing requirements, while large production volumes magnify water, energy, raw-material, and waste burdens. This editorial argues that sustainable bioprocess engineering must therefore connect biological performance with reactor engineering, process control, separations, utilities, scale-up, and economics across the full production train. Modern fermentation, continuous processing, process analytical technologies, digital models, advanced control, and intensified separations provide powerful tools, but their value depends on evidence under realistic scales and operating variability. Persistent challenges include scale-dependent physiology, titre–yield–productivity trade-offs, strain stability, mass-transfer limitations, process variability, purification burdens, and uncertain resource efficiency. Research priorities include scale-down models, continuous and intensified processing, robust monitoring, predictive digital bioprocessing, energy-efficient separations, water minimization, modular manufacturing, pilot-scale validation, and integrated techno-economic and lifecycle assessment.