ABSTRACT
Agro-industrial wastes consist of many and varied residues from agriculture and food industry, and are produced worldwide at an estimated rate of thousand million tons per year. Although several agro-industrial residues can be disposed of safely in the environment due to their biodegradable nature, the vast quantities in which they are generated make it necessary to look for disposition mechanisms involving the production of goods or services. Microbial processes are being examined as viable remediation technologies to fight environmental pollution, thus a variety of cleanup technologies have been put into practice and novel methods of bioremediation for the treatment of agro-industrial wastes are currently being worked out. Ligninolytic macrofungi have the ability to mineralize, release, and store a wide variety of toxic materials and compounds. In addition, this specific fungi group is a common source of valuable biochemical products for industrial importance. This chapter discusses the most studied ligninolytic macrofungi for the bioremediation of important agro-industrial wastes – olive mill wastewater, pulp and paper mill effluents, and sugarcane stillages- their main characteristics as well as the transformation processes involved in the production of several high-value compounds.
