Vegetable oils are expensive and require large areas of farmland for their production, so the direct usage of these oils for biodiesel production is expensive and unsustainable. However, there are multiple and as yet unexploited alternative fatty acid sources. Similarly, bioethanol production for its direct use as a biofuel or as a biodiesel precursor requires huge amounts of corn grain or sugar cane. Nevertheless, industrial residues such as the vegetable oil refinery waste, as well as farming, forestry, livestock and domestic solid and liquid waste (Chen et al., 2009; Dizge et al., 2009) are widespread and huge sources of lipids and carbon. Wang et al. proposed the soybean oil deodorizer distillate (SODD), a by-product from the soybean oil refineries that represents 0.3-0.5% of the soybean oil processed, to produce biodiesel. With 45-55% of triglycerides and 25-35% of free fatty acids, these authors estimated that around 80% of the SODD can be transformed into biodiesel in a transesterification with methanol by the Thermomyces lanuginosa and Candida antarctica lipases in the presence of tertbutanol and 3A molecular sieve (Wang et al., 2006). Park et al.

used waste-activated bleaching earth (ABE), a residue of the rapeseed or palm oil refinery industry that stores 35-40% of oil and can be used to synthesize multiple bulk chemicals, including biodiesel. As in the Wang example, these authors chose methanol as alcohol, but their solvent choice was fuel oil and kerosene, the catalyst was Candida cylindracea lipase and the obtained FAME was extracted with a filter press (Park et al., 2008). Al-Zuhair and colleagues studied the production of biodiesel from simulated waste cooking oil (SWCO) with free — and immobilized — on ceramic beads Candida antarctica and Burkholderia cepacia lipases, with or without organic solvent. They obtained the best yield when they used B. cepacia without organic solvent, and observed that the system worked better when the enzymes were immobilized, probably because the clay structural microenvironments offered the lipases protection against the methanol derived denaturation (Al-Zuhair et al., 2009). Recently, Steen et al., among others, have proposed the direct fermentation of cellulosic biomass to produce biodiesel, fatty alcohols, waxes and other valuable chemicals (Steen et al., 2010). Their approach combines the waste management and the guidelines defined by Steinbuchel et al. with the new trends in synthetic biology and consolidated bioprocesses. This multidisciplinary approach brings a new flexible, easy-to-modify toolbox, composed of genetically modified FAEE synthetic strains, harbouring the enzymatic apparatus needed to produce ethanol from raw (hemi)cellulosic materials, to transesterificate it with fatty acids, or to synthesize both the fatty acids and the ethanol directly from the cellulose (Steen et al., 2010).