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Enormous quantity of waste/wastewater is being generated every day from domestic and industrial activities, which is composed of reasonably good biodegradable carbon fraction associated with inherent net positive energy. Treatment of waste to regulatory limits is an essential prerequisite to evade its negative impact on the environment. Generally, the normal perception of waste is that it is not something useful and has no value, but this is not true because waste has a lot of hidden potential that can be recovered. If the biodegradable component of waste can be effectively and economically harnessed, various forms of bioenergy and value added products can be obtained, which can eventually meet the world’s growing energy demand. Bio-hydrogen, bio-electricity, bio-plastics, bio-diesel, etc. are some value added products that can be harnessed from waste. Transforming wastewater/waste into usable forms by retaining remediation as an integral element is the essential spirit behind the development of sustainable waste remediation processes, which leads to integrated and optimized sub-systems of biorefinery. Biorefinery portrays inte¬grative and multifunctional processes in optimized sequence to utilize every constituent of waste with an objective of maximizing the productivity of marketable intermediates and products (chemicals, materials, bioenergy/biofuels, etc.), ensuring enhancement of the process economics as well as environmental sustainability. This communication attempts to comprehensively address waste valorization in general, leading to the development of sustainable remediation technologies coupling resource recovery as focal goal in the framework of biorefinery. |