A biorefinery approach for dairy wastewater treatment and product recovery towards establishing a biorefinery complexity index

Nowadays, dairy waste represents a global challenge as a result of the amount produced worldwide. Initially, one of the major objectives was to transform this waste into a single valuable product, but recently the concept of biorefinery has been applied to convert dairy waste into several valuable bio-products such as biofuels, feed additives, bioplastics, and chemicals. Despite the potential that represents this kind of waste for the production of bioproducts, it is not a technology used extensively. An important factor that can help to become the biorefinery of dairy waste more attractive is the measure of the biorefinery complexity index (BCI). The BCI is a measure of the technological and economic risk to develop a bloreflnery process using specific raw materials, production, extraction and purification processes. Our analysis of a dairy biorefinery gives a BCI of 20, which reflects a sustainable biorefinery. The dairy biorefinery synergistic approach predicted presents a zero-waste generation in the dairy industry. This will provide strength in academic and industrial level towards a biorefinery process design. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.