Location: Healthy Processed Foods Research
Title: When wastewater has worth: Water reconditioning opportunities in the food industry to achieve sustainable food manufacturing (abstract)Author
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Milczarek, Rebecca |
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Submitted to: Meeting Abstract
Publication Type: Abstract Only Publication Acceptance Date: 4/22/2016 Publication Date: 4/25/2016 Citation: Milczarek, R.R. 2016. When wastewater has worth: Water reconditioning opportunities in the food industry to achieve sustainable food manufacturing (abstract). Interpretive Summary: Technical Abstract: A major sustainability goal of food processing wastewater (FPWW) management is to not only decrease environmental pollution but also utilize valuable co-products present in the FPWW. Many processed food products, especially those from fruits and vegetables, result in FPWW streams that contain compounds that could be utilized as human food ingredients, animal feed ingredients, or industrial chemicals. Reconditioning of FPWW enables recovery of these valuable co-products and/or the water itself. It also reduces the biological oxygen demand, chemical oxygen demand, and solids content of the processing plant effluent stream, resulting in lower WW treatment costs. The first step in evaluating whether a FPWW reconditioning system is appropriate for a given processing plant is to determine which potentially valuable co-product compounds are present in the FPWW stream. Economic and environmental sustainability considerations then guide the design and implementation of systems for isolating, stabilizing, and utilizing the recovered co-products. In this presentation, several case studies are used to illustrate FPWW reconditioning projects; these case studies span the full spectrum of the project lifecycle, from co-product identification to full industrial implementation. Examples in which industrial, government, and academic entities have collaborated to design effective FPWW reconditioning systems are emphasized. |
