Integral use of orange peel waste through the biorefinery concept: an experimental, technical, energy, and economic assessment

This work aims to evaluate from an energy and economic perspective the production of essential oil, pectin, and biogas as alternatives to valorize orange peel waste. For this, the chemical characterization, extraction of essential oil, and pectin of industrial of this residue samples were done. Moreover, the remaining solid was used to produce biogas. The experimental results were used as input data to simulate the biorefinery. The mass and energy balances from the simulation were used to perform energy and economic analysis of the biorefinery system analyzing the net present value and processing scale as determining factors. Also, mass and energy efficiency indicators were applied to evaluate the performance of the biorefinery. The experimental essential oil, pectin extraction, and biogas yields 0.61% w/w (wet basis), 10.35% w/w (wet basis), and 89.39 Nm(3)/ton OPW mL biogas/g VS with a CH4 content of 66.73% (59.6 Nm(3)/ton OPW), respectively. The mass and energy indicators show a good performance of the process in terms of mass and energy efficiency indicators. Moreover, the economic analysis leads to observe that the proposed biorefinery is only feasible at low processing scales. In a conclusion, orange peel waste is a potential feedstock to obtain value-added products such as essential oil and pectin and energy vectors such as biogas in an energy and economic feasible way at low scales allowing the implementation of small-scale integrated biorefinery systems.

Automated summary

The study evaluated the feasibility of producing essential oil, pectin, and biogas from orange peel waste, indicating that it is viable at low processing scales.