Introduction

The First Industrial Revolution began when manual labour transitioned to machines. Fossil fuels and steam eventually replaced wood and water as an energy source used predominantly for the mechanized production of textiles and iron. The emergence of the required numerous enormous factories gave rise to smoke pollution due to the immense growth in coal consumption. The manufactured gas industry produced highly toxic effluent that was released into sewers and rivers polluting the water. Many pieces of legislation were introduced to overcome this issue, but with varying degrees of effectiveness.

Alongside our growth in world population, the problems that we had with waste remained, but together with our increase in number the waste produced has also increased additionally. The immense volume of waste materials generated from human activity and the potentially detrimental effects on the environment and on public health have awakened in ourselves a critical need to embrace current scientific methods for the safe disposal of wastes. We are informed daily that our food waste must be better utilized to ensure enough food is available to feed the world's growing population in a sustainable way (Thyberg and Tonjes 2016). Some things are easy, like waste food and cellulose products can be turned into compost, but how do we recycle sheep’s wool? Or shrimp shells? Despite the fact that both these substances are hazardous, and have caused environmental and economic impact from being incinerated; but we anticipate that those substances may have the potential to convert into added value applications.

We have been working in this area for over 15 years, working towards managing them and seeking their added value applications. We take the biological products, process (reconstitute) and engineer them into added value products such as functional and nanostructure materials including edible films, foams and composites including medical devices useful in the human body. Anything that we can ingest, should not cause an immune response in the human system.

Natural biomacromolecules display the inherent ability to perform very specific chemical, mechanical or structural roles. Specifically, protein- and polysaccharide-based biomaterials have come to light as the most promising candidates for many biomedical applications due their biomimetic and nanostructured arrangements, their multi-functional features, and their capability to function as matrices that are capable of facilitating cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions.

中文翻译：

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危险的纳米建筑生物聚合物的潜力未开发

介绍

第一次工业革命始于体力劳动过渡到机器。化石燃料和蒸汽最终取代了木材和水，成为主要用于纺织品和铁的机械化生产的能源。由于煤炭消费量的巨大增长，所需的众多巨型工厂的出现导致了烟尘污染。天然气工业产生的剧毒废水被排放到下水道和河流中，污染了水。引入了许多立法来克服这个问题，但是效果不同。

除了世界人口的增长之外，我们所面临的废物问题仍然存在，但随着我们数量的增加，产生的废物也有所增加。人类活动产生的大量废物以及对环境和公共健康的潜在有害影响，已经使我们自身迫切需要采用当前科学方法来安全处置废物。我们每天都被告知，我们必须更好地利用我们的食物垃圾，以确保有足够的食物以可持续的方式养活全球不断增长的人口（Thyberg and Tonjes 2016）。有些事情很容易，例如废弃的食物和纤维素产品可以变成堆肥，但是我们如何回收绵羊的羊毛呢？还是虾壳？尽管这两种物质都是有害的，焚化造成环境和经济影响；但是我们预计这些物质可能会转化为增值应用。

我们在这一领域已经工作了15年以上，致力于管理它们并寻求其增值应用。我们将生物产品进行处理（重组）并将其工程化为增值产品，例如功能性和纳米结构材料，包括可食用的薄膜，泡沫和复合材料，包括对人体有用的医疗设备。我们可以摄取的任何东西都不应在人体系统中引起免疫反应。

天然生物大分子具有执行特定化学，机械或结构作用的固有能力。具体而言，基于蛋白质和多糖的生物材料因其仿生和纳米结构排列，其多功能特性以及其作为能够促进细胞分裂的基质的功能而成为许多生物医学应用中最有希望的候选者和细胞基质相互作用。