Is the production of microalgae and the derived bioproducts sustainable? A meta-review outlining the challenges and opportunities of circular bioeconomy and zero-waste approaches - ScienceDirect

Fig. 1. Papers published on microalgae in the year range 1960–2024. The annual publications were retrieved from a query in the Scopus database (www.scopus.com accessed on May 14th, 2025) with the search term “microalgae” within the title, abstract, or keywords (TITL-ABS-KEY). Fig. 2. Overview of microalgae bioprocessing: material and energy inputs, bioreactor configurations, microalgal constituent compounds, harvesting techniques, possible downstream processing steps and techniques, and relevant examples of the obtainable bioproducts. Note that microalgal bioprocessing can follow multiple routes, each incorporating only some of the downstream steps and omitting the others. The images of (i) open systems, (ii) closed systems, and (iii) fermenters are reproduced from (i) Pérez-López et al. [55] with permission from Elsevier, (ii) Gurreri et al. [13], and (iii) Thoré et al. [16] with permission from Elsevier. Table 1. Features of the search protocol applied to identify the review studies

Fig. 1. Papers published on microalgae in the year range 1960–2024. The annual publications were retrieved from a query in the Scopus database (www.scopus.com accessed on May 14th, 2025) with the search term “microalgae” within the title, abstract, or keywords (TITL-ABS-KEY). Fig. 2. Overview of microalgae bioprocessing: material and energy inputs, bioreactor configurations, microalgal constituent compounds, harvesting techniques, possible downstream processing steps and techniques, and relevant examples of the obtainable bioproducts. Note that microalgal bioprocessing can follow multiple rout