Agro-industrial Wastewaters Bioremediation by Ligninolytic Macrofungi

Abstract

Industrial activity has always resulted in some class of contamination, either solid waste,wastewater or gaseous pollution. The agro-industrial wastes consist of many and varied residues from agriculture and food industry and are worldwide produced at an estimated rate of thousand million tons per year. Although several agro-industrial residues can be disposed of safely in the environment due to its biodegradable nature, the vast quantities in which they are generated makes it necessary to look for disposition mechanisms involving the production of goods or services. Biotechnology offers many feasible alternatives to thedisposal of agro-industrial wastes, allowing seeing the problems of waste disposal under a new light, as a source of valuable resources for the production of fuels, feeds, medical, pharmaceutical and industrial products.Microbial processes are being examined as viable remediation technologies to fight environmental pollution, thus a variety of cleanup technologies have been put into practice and novel methods of bioremediation for the treatment of agro-industrial wastes are currently being worked out. An emerging field is the exploitation of waste?s nutritive potential for the production of various high-value compounds.