Waste Valorisation, Bioremediation and Resource Recovery for Sustainable Systems

Abstract

Waste streams are increasingly recognized not only as pollution burdens but also as heterogeneous reservoirs of carbon, nutrients, metals, energy, water, and functional compounds. Agricultural residues, food waste, wastewater, municipal organics, industrial effluents, and contaminated soils can potentially support resource recovery while environmental damage is reduced. This editorial argues that genuine valorisation requires more than producing a secondary product from waste: recovery must improve environmental performance, manage contaminants safely, and remain technically and economically credible. Current approaches include anaerobic digestion, microbial fermentation, nutrient recovery, algal systems, biosorption, phytoremediation, microbial electrochemical technologies, and integrated waste biorefineries. Their limitations include feedstock heterogeneity, pretreatment demand, pathogens, toxic metals, process instability, recovery costs, secondary residues, product-safety requirements, logistics, regulatory barriers, and uncertain markets. Research should prioritize selective recovery, integrated treatment–valorisation systems, nutrient and water loops, high-value bioproducts, contaminant management, distributed processing, long-term bioremediation validation, and combined lifecycle and techno-economic assessment. Sustainable resource recovery should ultimately be judged by avoided pollution and retained value across the complete system.