A sweet solution to carbon dioxide

The way we grow and consume food currently accounts for a quarter of global carbon emissions and is a major driver of biodiversity loss.

Microorganisms such as bacteria, yeast and microalgae can be used as an alternative way to produce food ingredients for humans. But the substances required to grow these microorganisms – sugars, organic acids and proteins – are also currently produced in ways that contribute to biodiversity loss.

The SweetAir project, led by a team from Wageningen University in the Netherlands and funded by ESA Discovery, is building on technologies and lessons learned from human spaceflight to directly convert carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into food ingredients for humans.

The team is repurposing technology originally developed to recycle air on the International Space Station to capture and concentrate carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. They will then feed this carbon dioxide to systems containing the enzymes that plants use to convert carbon dioxide into glucose during photosynthesis.

Inside cells, these enzymes are limited by the shape and size of the cell. They also have to co-exist with other processes that are necessary to keep the cell alive. Freed from the confines of a cell, the enzymes have access to a larger surface area and can much more efficiently convert carbon dioxide into sugars for human use.

SweetAir aims to develop a scalable and more sustainable source of food ingredients that will help humankind address climate change and support Earth's ecological balance. This new approach could even circle back into spaceflight, providing a more efficient way to produce fresh food ingredients for human crews over longer missions by recovering and reusing water, carbon and nitrogen resources.