Bacterial cellulose and biopolymers from food waste
Producing bacterial cellulose from food-waste substrates with Komagataeibacter xylinus, as part of a student-led sustainability lab on the Westminster campus.
The Living Lab
The Cavendish Living Lab is a vertically integrated project at the University of Westminster. Students from different disciplines and years use the campus as a laboratory to co-create solutions to food waste, plastic waste and wastewater. It is led by Dr Pooja Basnett, with Dr Dipankar Sengupta and Dr Linda Percy, and funded by the Quintin Hogg Trust. Its three strands are urban food growing, bioplastics and water management. The project was a finalist in the 2023 Green Gown Awards (Tomorrow’s Employees).
My work
I worked in the bioplastics strand, where the aim was to make sustainable materials from the university’s own waste streams.
- Screened food and drink waste as carbon sources for bacterial cellulose, in 24-well plates and then in flasks of Hestrin–Schramm medium: fruit and vegetable waste, juices, ciders, coffee waste, beetroot, turmeric and spinach, among others.
- Produced bacterial cellulose from food-waste substrates using Komagataeibacter xylinus, increasing yield by 5%.
- With the team, tested how processing changes the material: bleaching; natural dyes (turmeric, spinach, coffee, indigo, beetroot, raspberry); air-drying versus freeze-drying; blending with kombucha cellulose, soybean, zein and seaweed; and growing cellulose in 3D-printed moulds.
- Prototyped bacterial cellulose as a wearable material, and exhibited the materials at the Cavendish Living Lab Symposium 2023.
- Contributed to work on polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), another family of microbially produced bioplastics.
- Contributed to cross-disciplinary projects linking hydroponic food growing with microbial biofilm production.
- Co-led project documentation and presented results to internal research committees.
What I took from it
Fermentation is where microbiology meets process constraints: substrate composition, yield and reproducibility decide whether a product is useful. That way of thinking carries straight into natural-product work, where culture conditions decide what a microbe makes.