General introductionNowadays, the origin of most of the materials used by a person everyday can be traced back to petroleum. This makes petroleum the very central point around which a person's daily life is orbiting. The obvious downside of this close relationship is a quicker depletion of petroleum resources. The consequences of this depletion can even be as catastrophic as turning petroleum into a tool that creates tension between various communities around the world. An example of essential petroleum-derived materials is polymers. They are the major building blocks of the world we have built in the 21 st century and call it home. Volatile fatty acids (VFAs), fatty acids of six or fewer carbon atoms [1], are among the ingredients of common polymers. They serve as food and feed preservers as well. To reduce reliance on petroleum resources, one may start with reducing petroleum-derived chemicals that are in high demand. Reducing of course means proposing an alternative resource and production route. VFAs are produced at tremendous rates mainly by petrochemical routes [2], and therefore, they seem to be good candidates. Acetic, propionic and butyric acids are the most common VFAs, and at a total production rate of about 11.5 × 10 6 t/a, they account for about 50 % of the global short organic acids (up to C 6 ) market.[2] The current capacity of anaerobic digestion in Europe is about 9 × 10 6 t/a of organic fraction of municipal solid waste. [3, 4] Assuming that municipal solid waste is entirely convertible to glucose, and a high glucose to acetic acid yield of 0.8 g/g is achievable [2], biological acetic acid can be produced at a rate of 7.2 × 10 6 t/a. This value clearly shows that, by utilizing only the waste streams that are generated in Europe as fermentation feed, a very large fraction of the global acetic acid demand can potentially be met.A great deal of study has been invested on assessing various alternative resources and production routes for VFAs, and they seem to have reached a common conclusion that waste streams and fermentation are promising alternative resources and production route respectively. [1, 2,[5][6][7] Utilizing waste as the resource comes with an extra bonus which is replacing the approach of treatment to meet environmental regulations with treatment to produce value-added chemicals. Fermentation is a potential route to produce various chemicals at a low cost and high efficiency.[8] Furthermore, since numerous types of microorganisms are available to be used for fermentation, a wide variety of chemicals can be produced by fermentation. [2, 9] In the literature, several examples of production of VFAs by fermentation have been reported with resources ranging from industrial wastewater to newspaper waste. [5-7, 10, 11] 3An unfortunate limitation of fermentation is the low VFA content of the resulting broths, as the initial waste streams are often poor in carbon. This limitation poses a major bottleneck to a process that is to deliver highly concentrated waste-derivedVFAs. This neces...