Food waste biomass: a resource for high-value chemicals

Our society currently faces the twin challenges of resource depletion and waste accumulation leading to rapidly escalating raw material costs and increasingly expensive and restrictive waste disposal legislation. The variety of food processes used in the food and drink industry globally generate food supply chain waste on a multi tonne scale every year. Such resides include wheat straw surpluses, spent coffee grounds or citrus peels, all of which represent a resource for an integrated, product focused biorefinery. Orange peel is particularly interesting: pectin and D-limonene, two marketable components, can be produced together with several flavonoids under the same conditions at a litre scale using low temperature microwave treatment. The running costs for such a process on large scale (50 000 metric tonnes per annum) have been estimated on the basis of the combined production of pectin and D-limonene.