Upcycling Food Waste into Bacterial nanocellulose to Create High-Performance Dimensional Wood

Bacterial nanocellulose (BC) can be readily fermented from various forms of organic municipal solid waste (MSW) and used in applications like sustainable paper, leather, and composite reinforcement. This SBIR project focuses on an unprecedented use of BC, solid dimensional wood, which could upcycle a large portion of the estimated 42.84 million tons of food waste in the U.S. still landfilled on an annual basis — including some of the country’s 10 million tons of waste spent beer grain and the 3600 tons of kombucha SCOBY. Specifically, BC will be the primary component of a replacement for endangered tropical hardwoods, entering markets such as musical instruments, flooring, decking, furniture, and paneling. BC resembles the cellulose naturally found in trees and other plants. Symmetry Wood’s technology converts BC into dense Pyrus™ (at least 90 lb/cb-ft) — surpassing the densest tree-derived woods — with the potential for comparable strength and toughness. The primary environmental benefits are two-fold: reduced methane emitted from landfills and less tropical forest destroyed by loggers. Data from Brazil showed that loggers kill an average of 31 trees, eliminating up to 50% of the canopy , to extract just one high-value tree like mahogany or ipê (popular as decking). This wastefulness also pervades in other rainforests. A report by Taylor Guitars showed that 9 out of 10 ebony trees logged in Cameroon, with an average of 4.4 ebony trees per hectare , are left to rot on the ground because buyers (and the market) reject any wood with light-toned streaking . Due to these kinds of practices, replacing even small volumes of tropical hardwood can reap significant environmental benefits. Symmetry’s analysis showed that displacing 10,000 ebony guitar fretboards, for example, would result in sparing the logging of 1,667 ebony trees and the degradation of 379 hectares (936 acres) of tropical forest — or roughly an area of forest the size of New York’s Central Park (U.S. guitar manufacturers use 30 times that number annually — driving the logging of an area twice the size of Manhattan year after year). If the alternative to ebony is made from food waste, it could avoid 514 kg CO2-eq and 1728.5 kg CO2-eq emissions for every ton of upcycled spent beer grain and kombucha SCOBY, respectively, in addition to the emissions avoided from the logging.