ABSTRACT Sustainable waste management is a substantial global challenge emerging in this eco‐concerned scenario, and appropriate management or recycling strategies are indispensable to counteract all the socio‐ecological issues allied with it. The advanced energy‐efficient organic waste conversion techniques are needed to ensure sustainability, as most of the conventional management practices cannot meet current environmental policies. Microbial enzyme‐mediated waste treatment is a promising green strategy that can be implemented on a large‐scale to transform organic waste into renewable energy supplies and biofertilizers. In this review, current waste treatment affairs, the significance of enzyme treatment, the dynamics and role of degradative enzymes, challenges and prospects of enzyme‐mediated waste management are discussed in detail. Recent advances in enzyme pretreatment, specific enzyme cocktails, and integrated enzyme‐chemical mediated process concepts have marked improved hydrolysis efficiency and energy conversion rate. It is apparent that enzyme addition exhibited significant effects in waste conversion in terms of enhanced biogas (79%), bioethanol (29.1 g/L), and biodiesel (98%) production. However, there are a few challenges that impede the functioning of this technology extensively, which include feedstock divergency, enzyme inhibition, low process stability, and high production cost. There are still critical knowledge gaps existing with the development of low‐cost enzyme systems with high‐loading rate, immobilized enzyme systems, on‐site synthetic consortia, and integrated hybrid systems, to enable sustainable, enzyme‐mediated waste degradation and eco‐friendly bioenergy generation in future. In outlook, profitable, substrate‐specific, microbial enzymes–driven, waste‐to‐energy models with high‐bioconversion rate are recommended for resource‐efficient waste valorization and energy recovery in temporal dimensions, by sustainable means.
Divakaran et al. (Mon,) studied this question.