Skip to main content
European Commission logo
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS
CORDIS Web 30th anniversary CORDIS Web 30th anniversary
Content archived on 2024-05-14

Valorisation of Wastes from Food Origin

Objective



The greasy residuals from food origin are basically composed by oils frying and greases; those residues present many environmental problems and important cons traints for the exploitation of water purifying units. Greasy residuals from fo od origin do not find today, efficient solution for their elimination. In Europ e the volume collected will be about 2 millions of tons per a year. The exis ting technical solutions for the elimination of greasy effluents are: a) Put i nto rubbish dump of class 11 (the European law of July 13th 1992, specifies the prohibition of this practice since July the first 2002). b) The compost, c) The incineration, d) The biologic degradation, e) The physic-chemical treat ment. To implement all these solutions it is needed to collect and transport the waste to centralised treatment plants. The cost of the collect, from 30 ECU/ton to 50 ECU/ton of waste, is the biggest inconvenient for all those proc esses. Also the treatment cost will have to be added. The second inconvenient f or the centralised organisation is related to the storage problem due to the bi ological activity of the waste. In fact today, the majority of the greasy waste s are not collected. Manufacturers evacuate their wastes to the water purifying units to aim at the reduction of the collect quantity. A decentralised treatme nt that allowed the transformation of wastes in marketable chemical products wo uld permit to balance the global treatment cost including the collect. The f ollowing proposal fits in the framework of research pertaining to innovative so lution allowing the valorisation of greasy wastes from food origin in the greas e industry in order to transform the original waste into glycerol and fatty aci ds. The impurities present in the waste and the relative big size of this indus try, is the main inconvenient for recycling The solution offered for study a nd development is as follows: 1) Definition of the purifying technology for greasy wastes; the separation technologies that will be studied are: the centri fugation attended by a thermal effect and the electrochemistry separation by no n-equilibrium of the zeta potential of the greasy molecules. This objective is an important milestone for the development of the project. The pre-treatment is absolutely needed, because of the impurities included in greasy wastes: water, food residues, oxide components, ... etc. These impurities are the major diff iculty to valorise these wastes as a secondary raw material. The pre-treated wa ste will be studied and evaluated for their utilisation in existing grease tran sformation plants into glycerol and fatty acids. It will be also studied its ut ilisation with the innovative process described in next objective. 2) Experi mental study of an alternative transformation process of purified greasy wastes into marketable glycerol and fatty acids; using a catalytic hydrolysis in enzy me media permitting to run the operation in an atmospheric pressure and a low t emperature. For this process a new hydrolysis reactor will be applied, it is a reciprocating plate reactor. The utilisation of this reactor aims at a close co ntact between the reactants. This will permit to reduce the mass transfers and accelerate the hydrolysis process; this will reduce the dimensions of equipment and the investment cost. This new technology would allow creating small treatm ents units closer to the productions, instead of big centralised plants.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.

You need to log in or register to use this function

Call for proposal

Data not available

Coordinator

Sopa Equarissage Sica S.A.
EU contribution
No data
Address
Cros de Montvert
15150 Montvert
France

See on map

Total cost
No data

Participants (5)