Journal of Food Processing & Technology

Food waste reduction in the dairy industry by recovering food ingredients, energy and water with advanced technologies

15^th International Conference on Food Processing & Technology

October 27-29, 2016 Rome, Italy

Francesca Scimia, Gabriele Di Giacomo, Alberto Gallifuoco and Luca Taglieri

University of L�??Aquila, Italy

Posters & Accepted Abstracts: J Food Process Technol

Abstract:

Traditionally, the dairy industry has to face with a serious problem related to the huge amount (more than 90% of the processed milk) of highly polluting and quickly perishable whey and other solid and liquid food waste (FW) resulting from washing, commercialization, packaging, food safety assurance, and others. At present, in order to overcome this problem, the large companies use the whey as raw material for producing concentrated protein powders (WPI) for human consumption, and/or single cell proteins (SCP) by lactose fermentation, thus eliminating/reducing the waste management costs. However, for small and medium dairy firms, localized in orographically difficult areas, environmental problems often conflict with the firm profit. In this contribution, the results obtained by applying two innovative technologies for recovering high quality products and biofuel are reported and discussed in detail. In particular, the feasibility of applying supercritical anti-solvent (SAS) to obtain a high value infant formula ingredient, and hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) for making energy intensive solid fuel, was investigated. The integration of SAS and HTC with membrane filtration based processes, allows to: a) reduce drastically the volume of concentrated whey to be collected in the facility devoted to the production of the food ingredients; b) produce a net amount of high quality water (about 60% of the milk); c) easily destroy all the solid and liquid FW still remaining after the whey management and, at the same time, produce a valuable solid biofuel.

Biography :

Email: francesca.scimia@univaq.it