Agro-industrial Wastes as Bioactive Molecules Source

Sustainable use of renewable natural resources, through value addition, using biological life processes, is an ideal transition from an oil-based economy to bioresource economy. Addressing climate change, renewable resources such as agro-industrial wastes, currently seen as low value materials, are in fact natural sources of value-added compounds that can be used, for example, as economic sources of bioactive substances of high interest for chemical, pharmaceutical and food industries. Moreover, agro-industrial by-products such as most of organic effluents have a high organic load content and can be vaporizable through a gaseous energy carrier production (methane/hydrogen) and a digested flow for agricultural purposes, using anaerobic digestion techniques. Once adopted, biological processes of these materials may contribute to reduce the environmental pollution burden. The present work refers to different procedures and methodologies applied to wastes valorisation that, within a biorefinery concept, had the achievement of valuable biomolecules as a core of the entire recovery line system. Several wastes/wastewaters mainly produced in the Mediterranean area were under study.