Agriculture, food, chemicals, pharma, materials, energy – billion-dollar manufacturing industries with massive impacts – are under increasing pressure to maximize productivity while minimizing negative effects on the environment. While these industries provide key commodities for modern living, they also account for more than 80% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and largely contribute to major threats to biodiversity, human health, and natural resources.

The overexploitation of non-renewable materials, changes in land use, and surging waste management issues are threatening the natural resources of generations to come, and new approaches are pivotal to realizing the vision of a sustainable future humanity has been building over the last couple of decades.

Fermentation has emerged as one of the key tools to facilitate the transition towards safer, cleaner, and less resource-consuming state of being. Bringing a new paradigm – anything can be produced biologically – fermentation is remodeling the way humanity approaches manufacturing while bringing solutions as diverse as the microbial kingdom. To illustrate what fermentation brings to the table, this article focuses on a back-to-back comparison of traditional manufacturing approaches and fermentation-based alternatives – focusing on raw materials, energy consumption, pollution, and circularity as key parameters.

Raw Materials

Traditional Manufacturing

Traditional manufacturing industries heavily rely on finite natural resources like fossil fuels, minerals, land, clean water, and healthy ecosystems. The exploitation of natural resources for raw materials is often accompanied by soil and water pollution, as well as massive land use changes that cause deforestation, habitat loss, and dislocation of local communities. While attempts are continuously being made to reduce the negative effects of raw material extraction and reliance on those materials, the desired results are still far from being achieved.

Facts:

• Fossil fuel (coal, oil, gas) consumption has increased 7 times since 1950, and despite the developments in renewable energy, it continues to have an increasing trend¹,
• Raw material processing and extraction (i.e. fossil energy carriers, non-metallic minerals, metal ores, and biomass) account for around 50% of GHG  emissions and more than 90% of global water stress and land-use-related biodiversity loss.²
• 720,000 square kilometers of land surface has changed annually since 1960.³   
• The agricultural industry consumes 70% of all surface water supplies globally.⁴

Fermentation

Fermentation is a biological process in which the biological activity of microbes is utilized and/or adapted to efficiently produce industrially-relevant ingredients. Microbes use biomass-derived renewable and fermentable carbon sources as food, like agricultural residues, biomass and waste streams. As such, it offers an inherently sustainable manufacturing approach. By efficiently converting low-value raw materials into high-value products like proteins, enzymes, and bio-based active ingredients, fermentation offers reduction of environmental footprint by utilizing existing waste streams while enhancing the economic viability of production systems.⁵

Using microbial cell factories fueled by renewable carbon sources instead of resource-intensive traditional manufacturing plants also reduces dependence on petroleum and mining, mitigating the environmental degradation associated with their extraction and processing.

Energy Consumption

Traditional Manufacturing

Many traditional manufacturing industries are energy-intensive, particularly in the production of chemicals, fertilizers, and pharmaceuticals. The synthesis of complex molecules through chemical processes often includes high temperatures, pressure, and intensive purification – achieved by energy-consuming equipment powered mostly by fossil fuels.

Facts:

• The energy sector produces more than 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions.⁶
• In 2022, the industry sector accounted for more than 25% of global energy consumption, with chemical and petrochemical industries being the highest energy consumers.⁷

Fermentation

Fermentation, in contrast, is a low-energy biological process. The metabolic activity of microorganisms occurs under ambient temperature and pressure, significantly reducing the energy input required for production. Precision fermentation specifically can optimize these processes, making them more energy-efficient by targeting specific metabolic pathways to produce desired molecules more quickly and with higher yields. This precision reduces the need for extensive downstream processing, saving both energy and water.

However, not all fermentation approaches have equal energy demands. Solid-state fermentation systems are particularly energy-efficient since they often do not require large volumes of water and rely on simpler, less energy-consuming equipment for maintaining microbial growth. On the other hand, cultivating microbes through liquid-state (submerged) fermentation requires pumping, stirring, and heating, which come with greater energy demands.  

Pollution

Traditional Manufacturing

Traditional industrial processes are often associated with significant air, water, and soil pollution. The chemical industry is one of the largest sources of industrial pollution, emitting large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO₂), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and hazardous waste. In agriculture, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides contribute to soil and water contamination, affecting ecosystems and human health.

Facts:

• At least 1 in 10 people die from air pollution-related diseases globally.
• Less than 1% of global land area has safe air pollution levels.⁸
• In many developing countries, 70% of industrial waste is discharged without any treatment.⁹

Fermentation

Fermentation processes are cleaner by nature, generating fewer emissions and less hazardous waste. Microbial fermentation typically produces CO2 as the primary byproduct, but it can be easily captured and reused in other processes. Precision fermentation can also be designed to produce zero-waste products, where every output is either a product or a recyclable material.

Circular fermentation systems are gaining traction, where the byproducts of fermentation can be reused within the same production loop or in other industrial processes, contributing to a more circular economy. For instance, waste products from food fermentation can be converted into biofertilizers or animal feed, reducing the need for chemical inputs and closing the loop on waste.

Circularity

Traditional Manufacturing

Traditional manufacturing operates on a largely linear model – raw materials are extracted, processed, used, and disposed of, resulting in significant waste generation and resource depletion. One of the most prominent examples of this comes from the food industry, where up to 30% of products are lost or wasted due to problems in production and inefficiency across the supply chain. Similar cases can be found in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries, where the impact is also significant despite smaller waste volumes, due to hazardous byproducts that are unrecyclable or take decades/centuries to degrade in the environment.

Facts:

• Today, only 7.2% of used materials are cycled back into our economies after use.¹⁰
• The circular economy can scale fast across industries to create value and jobs while increasing the resilience of supply chains and delivering massive economic growth potential, estimated at 1.8 trillion euros a year in Europe alone.¹¹

Fermentation

Fermentation, especially solid-state fermentation, offers a more circular approach to production as it can utilize organic waste streams from agriculture, forestry, food, and animal industry, as well as municipal waste, to produce biofuels, biopolymers, enzymes, and various industrially relevant ingredients. Additionally, the co-products of the process (e.g. organic acids, metabolites), can be integrated into other production cycles. As such, fermentation offers versatile opportunities to create closed-loop systems and enable circular production.

Fermentation as the Future of Sustainable Manufacturing

Fermentation technology offers a powerful alternative to traditional manufacturing methods that are resource-intensive and environmentally damaging. As the demand for sustainable solutions continues to grow, industries are slowly but steadily turning to biologicals and fermentation to reduce their environmental impact and realize the ambitious goals set by global governments and organizations to make industrial production net zero. By leveraging living organisms to process renewable raw materials in a circular and energy-efficient process with minimal pollution, fermentation positions sustainability as an inherent quality of manufacturing.

1. Energy Institute – Statistical Review of World Energy (2024). ↩︎
2. European Environment Agency. ↩︎
3. Karina Winkler, Richard Fuchs, Mark Rounsevell & Martin Herold (2021). Global land use changes are four times greater than previously estimated. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22702-2. ↩︎
4. FAO. ↩︎
5. Deepti Agrawal, Kelvin Awani, Seyed Ali Nabavi. (2023). Carbon emissions and decarbonisation: The role and relevance of fermentation industry in chemical sector. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cej.2023.146308 ↩︎
6. World Resources Institute. ↩︎
7. Final energy consumption in industry. Eurostat. ↩︎
8. Earth Org. ↩︎
9. United Nations. ↩︎
10. Circularity Gap Report 2023. ↩︎
11. The World Circular Economy Forum. ↩︎