Wastewater by olive oil mills and dairy production is offering GreenTech several opportunities to boost its competitiveness and growth across the Mediterranean regions, thanks to the scale up and further commercialisation of a new eco-innovative process and its green products, namely ReSpirA.
Currently the olive oil industry is one of the most relevant agro-food branches in Italy and in other countries of the Southern Europe such as Spain, which is right before Italy in the list of the main world producers of olive oil.
Even if representing an important sector of European economy (in 2007 there were 1.9 million farms with olive groves in the EU ), the olive oil production implies significant environmental drawbacks: in fact the overall production process generates a huge amount of wastewater, with a high polluting and phytotoxic content (i.e. antibacterial phenolic substances that resist to biological degradation).
With the ReSpirA project, GreenTech is willing to enter the European market with an innovative solution for the treatment of the wastewater derived from the olive oil and dairy production, which, conjugating different filtration techniques, allows at obtaining green marketable products:
1) organic fertilizer and clean water to be reused for agricultural purposes,
2) inorganic nutrients, to be further exploited for the cultivation, production and commercialisation of the Spirulina microalga, widely used in the food industry thanks to its particular nutritional characteristics.
With its environmental benefits, ReSpirA is supporting also the well-known European environmental challenges, promoted by the EU Sustainable Development Strategy through the “Water Framework Directive” (with particular reference to water scarcity and drought) and the “Nitrates Directive” (1991), which aims to protect water quality across Europe by preventing nitrates from agricultural sources polluting ground and surface waters and by promoting the use of good farming practices.
In addition, the European Union has adopted recently an ambitious strategy for developing the Bioeconomy in Europe, based on the innovative use of sustainable biological resources to cover the growing demand of the food, energy and industrial sectors. In this context the algae, as the Spirulina, represent emerging biological resources of great importance for their potential applications in different fields, including food and feed. The waters of the world host a large variety of organisms which are able to use light as source of energy to fuel their metabolism. Within these organisms, algae are a group of relatively simple, plant-like organisms, most of which capable of performing photosynthesis. Moreover algae contain several high-value molecules, such as lipids (oil), proteins and carbohydrates (sugars), and for this reason there is a growing interest in algae as production organisms. Algae, especially marine algae, have been already used as food, feed and fertilizers for centuries, and nowadays approximately 200 species are used worldwide in different sectors .
In ReSpirA, the microalga Spirulina will be cultivated, produced and commercialised: it is a human and animal food or nutritional supplement, which has been used as food for centuries by different populations and only rediscovered in recent years. It grows naturally in the alkaline waters of lakes in warm regions. It exists in the form of tiny green filaments coiled in spirals of varying tightness and number. It has a balanced protein composition, and the presence of rare essential lipids, numerous minerals and even vitamin B12 . Spirulina, thanks to the photosynthesis, absorbs CO2 from the air contributing, especially when intensively cultivated, to the reduction of carbon levels in the atmosphere. Moreover, the preservation of water will contribute to the maintenance of the correct water cycle, and the natural production of microalgae will avoid the use of chemicals fertilizer produced using carbon energy.
The utilization of wastewater to cultivate Spirulina will i) reduce the use of fresh water, ii) decrease the cost of nutrients for biomass cultivation and iii) contribute to the remediation of waste.
