Food-Waste Bio-refinery Implications of Carbon Nanostructure Synthesis and Fabrication

The enormous loss of food worldwide has begun to raise many issues on an economic level as well as an environmental one. However, on the other hand, food waste has the potential to create resources again and be turned into usable materials in an environmentally sustainable way. Combining food waste with the concepts of biorefineries and circular bioeconomy is an innovative approach to creating high-value new functional materials from organic wastes and simultaneously reduces environmental pollution and the consumption of natural resources. The purpose of this chapter is to assess the possibilities for the design and construction of food waste-based biorefineries that will produce carbon nanostructures. The first step in the process is an examination of the chemical structure of food waste, the various classes into which it can be divided and an analysis to evaluate its adequacy as a carbon-rich feedstock from which nanomaterials can be synthesised. The chapter gives a summary of various carbon nanostructures obtained from biomass, which include carbon nanotubes, graphene and graphene oxides, carbon quantum dots, carbon nanofibres and porous carbon, highlighting their basic structures and physicochemical features. Also discussed are the strategies for the fabrication and functionalisation of these materials and the composites and structural tuning, surface modification and heteroatom doping to make these materials perform better for more advanced applications.