The growing world population means that the environment is under great strain. Agriculture takes up large land areas and discharges nutrients to the surrounding environment. At the same time, there is tremendous pressure on the aquatic environment from all forms of industrial production that emits residual products such as wastewater, and regardless of whether we are talking about agricultural operations or industry, it is today associated with a huge energy consumption and the resulting climate impact.
With a new research breakthrough, researchers from DTU have succeeded in tackling all these problems in their search for the food of the future. Using the yeast cell Debaryomyces hansenii (D. hansenii), the researchers have shown that it is possible to exploit some of the industry's problematic waste streams to produce proteins at very low cost and very low energy consumption. This could move food production away from the fields and into steel tanks, the environment is spared from the wastewater, and the climate is far less impacted by CO2.
