Suchergebnisse

Every year more than 15 millions tones of olive mill wastes (OMW) are generated in the EU. Those wastes consist in vegetation waters, effluents from olive oil, washing, leaves and other solids coming from wet pomaces from two phase extraction systems. Each of these residues presents different challenges, and is sometimes covered by different legal frameworks at European and National level. The Oleico+ project (LIFE07INF/IT/438), brought together four European Institutions from olive oil producing Countries, Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal, to seek and select a set of environmental friendly technologies for the remediation or valorization of OMW, and to raise the awareness of olive oil stakeholders for an environmental sustainable olive mill waste management. The OMW management is becoming a critical issue for the sustainability of olive oil industry, because of the increasing quantities generated, the public environmental awareness and stricter environmental laws. Challenges posed by the OMW management are as diverse as the context of olive production itself. In all cases olive mill owners are in the top of an economic sector of major social and environmental importance in some of the more vulnerable Mediterranean regions of Europe, in an environment of depressed olive oil prices and a several of legal constrains and regulations. In this paper we examine the different contexts of OMW generation and management, their respective waste-streams and legislative frameworks. The work will also compare the situation across the four Member States, and presents the different technologies selected for the "Awareness Raising Campaign for the Treatment and Valorization of Olive Mill Wastes" now occurring in all Member Stat

The dairy industry is one of the most polluting industries in the food sector, with very high energy and water consumption demands. Dairy wastewater treatment is therefore mandatory to reduce its environmental impact and to allow water recycling and energy savings. In this work, retentates (concentrated lactose streams) obtained from dairy wastewater processed by nanofiltration or reverse osmosis were assessed for direct bioethanol production by lactose-fermenting yeasts. Two of the tested Kluyveromyces strains efficiently fermented all available lactose, with ethanol yields higher than 90% of the theoretical maximum (>0.47 g/g yield). A K. marxianus strain was selected that under severe oxygen-limiting conditions was able to reach 70 g/L (8.9 % v/v) of ethanol, which is compatible with energy-efficient distillation processes. The process here described for handling dairy wastewaters, making use of membrane technology, allows water recycling from the permeate, complying with legislation for drinking water, and simultaneous bioenergy (bioethanol) production from the retentate, therefore contributing to a more sustainable dairy industry.

The aim of the present work was the simultaneous treatment of urban wastewater using microalgae and the energetic valorization of the obtained biomass. Chlorella vulgaris (Cv), Scenedesmus obliquus (Sc) and a naturally occurring algal Consortium C (ConsC) were grown in an urban wastewater. The nutrient removals were quite high and the treated water fits the legislation (PT Dec-Lei 236/98) in what concerns the parameters analysed (N, P, COD). After nutrient depletion the microalgae remained two more weeks in the photobioreactor (PBR) under nutritional stress conditions, to induce sugar accumulation (22–43%). The stressed biomass was converted into biohydrogen (bioH2), a clean energy carrier, through dark fermentation by a strain of the bacteria Enterobacter aerogenes. The fermentation kinetics were monitored and fitted to a modified Gompertz model. The highest bioH2 production yield was obtained for S. obliquus (56.8 mL H2/gVS) which was very similar when using the same algae grown in synthetic media.