ABSTRACT
The major problems that plagued life on earth over the 21st century are the environmental erraticism caused by water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and the energy crisis attributed to continuous demographic growth and extensive industrialization. Among several innovative technologies designed so far, microalgae-based bioremediation has been one of the potential adoptions to attain environmental sustainability. The uniqueness of phycoremediation is its inherent ability (i) to sequester atmospheric CO2 as a carbon source, thereby reducing the carbon footprint on the environment; (ii) to consume and remediate nutrients and toxic compounds from wastewater; and (iii) to simultaneously generate biomass rich in value-added chemicals, ranging from biofuels to feed, food, nutraceuticals, and pharmaceuticals. These multiple roles of microalgae have opened up the scope for consolidated bioprocessing with bioremediation, simultaneous carbon sequestration, and biorefinery, thereby leading towards process sustainability. However, several bottlenecks from upstream to downstream processes still hamper the complete realization of the technology in a commercial scale. To that end, the present study assesses the major hurdles and the path ahead towards the commercialization and sustainable extenuation of environmental issues utilizing microalgae as a cell factory.
