Sugar Beet Pulp as a Source of Valuable Biotechnological Products

The sugar industry generates large amounts of various types of waste, such as sugar beet pulp, leaves, and molasses, which can be used as valuable substrates in biotechnology. Such biomass may be used for microbial cultivation to produce cellular proteins, organic acids, biologically important secondary metabolites, enzymes, prebiotic oligosaccharides, and other valuable products. However, before they can be used in biotechnological processes, it is necessary to pretreat the wastes to hydrolyze their biopolymers into simple compounds. This chapter describes the composition of sugar beet pulp, the chemical pretreatment methods that can be used to obtain suitable media for microbial cultivation, the microorganisms used in such biotechnological processes, and new strategies to produce valuable compounds, including lactic acid, propylene glycol, furfural, furfuryl alcohol, and tetrahydrofurfuryl alcohol. The solutions presented here have the potential to generate additional revenue for businesses, from the sale of new products, such as food, animal feed, and green chemicals.