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Biofuel from food waste

22.11.2017

According to the United Nations, people end up in the trash about a third of all food. Although specific figures vary from country to country (for example, in Europe and North America, the volume of food thrown away per year is approximately 100 kg per person, and in poor regions of Africa and Asia - 10 kg), the result is still a whopping amount of 1,3, XNUMX billion tons per year. Of course, a natural question arises whether it is possible to do something useful with this food waste, especially since there is so much of it.

One option is to produce biofuels from it. The idea itself is not new, and here fermentation of carbohydrates and interesterification of fats are usually used (during interesterification, complex fat molecules exchange their structural elements, so that as a result, fats have a lower melting point, they are better oxidized by oxygen, etc.). However, with the help of fermentation of carbohydrates and interesterification of fats, only part of the waste raw materials can be converted into biofuels.

Researchers from the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, together with colleagues from the Joint Institute for High Temperatures of the Russian Academy of Sciences, have proposed a more efficient approach to food waste disposal. In their experiments, they used the hydrothermal liquefaction method, which is not only much more energy efficient, but also allows all raw materials to be converted into biofuels with a minimum amount of waste. In addition, the hydrothermal liquefaction method also makes it possible to obtain biofuel from wet biomass, eliminating the stage of drying the feedstock with the inevitable energy costs for this drying.

By subjecting parmesan cheese, ham and apples to hydrothermal liquefaction, the researchers found that the result was a water-soluble fraction and a water-insoluble oil (in the case of apples, only a water-soluble fraction was obtained). The molecular composition of the reaction products is very diverse and more like not ordinary oil, but wood pyrolysis products (tar).

In the future, hydrothermal liquefaction could be optimized to produce different types of biofuels - for example, biofuels suitable for cars - but first we need to describe in more detail exactly what molecules are produced by this method of processing food waste.

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