Valorization of chitins extracted from North Morocco shrimps: Comparison of chitin reactivity and characteristics

Huge quantities of waste discharged by the gray and pink shrimp decortication units in the North of Morocco can be valorized by producing about 950 tons of pure chitin, which can be transformed into 700 tons of highly to totally deacetylated chitosan. During the preparation of chitin and chitosan from gray and pink shrimps, differences in reaction behavior were observed even though these are taxonomically close species. The presented results concern several chitinous sources, and they show that the progress in the N-deacetylation reactions of chitin would be linked to the crystallinity index of the starting chitin. Following the kinetic study of the polymer hydrolysis during N-deacetylation, the difference in the molecular weights of the chitosan samples obtained under identical reaction conditions was related to the differences between molecular weights of the native chitin, 478 000 g.mol(-1) for pink shrimp and 562 000 for gray shrimp. (c) 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2019, 136, 47804.