Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2018 Jan 17;376(1):3.
doi: 10.1007/s41061-017-0182-z.

Green and Sustainable Separation of Natural Products from Agro-Industrial Waste: Challenges, Potentialities, and Perspectives on Emerging Approaches

Vânia G Zuin  1   2 , Luize Z Ramin  3
Affiliations
Review

Green and Sustainable Separation of Natural Products from Agro-Industrial Waste: Challenges, Potentialities, and Perspectives on Emerging Approaches

Vânia G Zuin et al. Top Curr Chem (Cham). .

Abstract

New generations of biorefinery combine innovative biomass waste resources from different origins, chemical extraction and/or synthesis of biomaterials, biofuels, and bioenergy via green and sustainable processes. From the very beginning, identifying and evaluating all potentially high value-added chemicals that could be removed from available renewable feedstocks requires robust, efficient, selective, reproducible, and benign analytical approaches. With this in mind, green and sustainable separation of natural products from agro-industrial waste is clearly attractive considering both socio-environmental and economic aspects. In this paper, the concepts of green and sustainable separation of natural products will be discussed, highlighting the main studies conducted on this topic over the last 10 years. The principal analytical techniques (such as solvent, microwave, ultrasound, and supercritical treatments), by-products (e.g., citrus, coffee, corn, and sugarcane waste) and target compounds (polyphenols, proteins, essential oils, etc.) will be presented, including the emerging green and sustainable separation approaches towards bioeconomy and circular economy contexts.

Keywords: Bioeconomy and circular economy; Biomass waste; Biorefinery; Green analytical techniques; Green and sustainable extraction; Sustainable separation.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Representation of an integrated planetary flow system based on the Dymaxion map, emphasizing some coupled cycles related to food production and socio-environmental impacts among (1) Brazil, (2) China, (3) the Caribbean, and (4) the Sahara Desert. Adapted from [1]
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
The agro-industrial waste hierarchy modified from [15]. The main idea is to promote sustainable production and consumption systems through zero-waste biorefinery
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Holistic biorefinery model integrating biomass, biofuel, biomaterials and bioenergy cycle, based on green and sustainable technologies in the scope of bioeconomy and circular economy. Updated and expanded from [16, 17]
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Number of publications per year focusing on green and sustainable separation (extraction, fractionation and purification) of natural products from waste (ISIS Web of Knowledge, January 2006 to December 2017)
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Main green and sustainable techniques used to separate natural products from waste described in research papers (ISIS Web of Knowledge, January 2006 to December 2017)
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Liu J, Mooney H, Hull V, Davis SJ, Gaskell J, Hertel T, Lubchenco J, Seto KC, Gleick P, Kremen C, Li S. Systems integration for global sustainability. Science. 2015;347:12588320–12588329. - PubMed
    1. Kiser B. Circular economy: getting the circulation going. Nature. 2016;53:443–446. - PubMed
    1. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. World hunger on the rise again, reversing years of progress. http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/902489/icode/. Accessed 03 Jul 2017
    1. Godfray HCJ, Beddington JR, Crute IR, Haddad L, Lawrence D, Muir JF, Pretty J, Robinson S, Thomas SM, Toulmin C. Food security: the challenge of feeding 9 billion people. Science. 2010;327(5967):812–818. doi: 10.1126/science.1185383. - DOI - PubMed
    1. United Nations (2015) World Population prospects: the 2015 revision and key findings and advance tables. United Nations, New York. https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/publications/files/key_findings_wpp_2015.pdf. Accessed 20 Oct 2016

LinkOut - more resources