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New Solutions for Managing Olive Mill Waste Water

By Luciana Squadrilli
Nov. 12, 2014 09:55 UTC

Basically, two things come out of an olive when you mill it: olive oil and water. We know what to do with the oil. Managing the water, on the other hand is a del­i­cate and expen­sive chal­lenge.

The man­age­ment of waste water remains a crit­i­cal and unsolved prob­lem, espe­cially in regions where huge quan­ti­ties are pro­duced.

Yet these byprod­ucts also con­tain phe­no­lic com­pounds rec­og­nized for their anti-inflam­ma­tory and antimi­cro­bic prop­er­ties.

That’s why sev­eral approaches have been inves­ti­gated to recover bioac­tive chem­i­cals from olive mill waste waters in order to exploit them for phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal, nutri­tional and cos­metic appli­ca­tions.

We already wrote about a research on olive oil byprod­ucts coor­di­nated by Prof. Maurizio Servili from Università di Perugia.

Giuseppe Di Lecce (Photo: NYIOOC)

Now, another Italian study on pos­si­ble treat­ments and appli­ca­tions for olive mill waste water (OMW) has been car­ried out by Dr. Giuseppe Di Lecce and fel­low researchers (Alfredo Cassano, Alessandra Bendini, Carmela Conidi, Lidietta Giorno and Tullia Gallina Toschi) at the University of Bologna.

The com­po­si­tion of OMW shows a large vari­abil­ity depend­ing on sev­eral para­me­ters such as cul­ti­var, har­vest­ing time and oil extrac­tion tech­nol­ogy, the researchers point out.

OMW is a dark liq­uid efflu­ents char­ac­ter­ized by high con­cen­tra­tions of organic com­pounds, includ­ing organic acids, sug­ars, tan­nins, pectins and phe­no­lic sub­stances that make them phy­to­toxic and inhibit bac­te­r­ial activ­ity.

In terms of pol­lu­tion, one cubic meter of OMW is equiv­a­lent to 100 – 200 cubic meters of domes­tic sewage. Its uncon­trolled dis­posal in water reser­voirs leads to severe prob­lems for the entire ecosys­tem.

In Di Lecce’s study, olive mill waste waters were treated to eval­u­ate the char­ac­ter­is­tics of per­me­ate and reten­tate frac­tions pro­duced by an inte­grated mem­brane sys­tem work­ing at two dif­fer­ent vol­ume con­cen­tra­tion fac­tors.

Researchers eval­u­ated the effect of two mem­brane-based fil­tra­tion steps (micro­fil­tra­tion and nanofil­tra­tion) on the con­tent of chem­i­cal oxy­gen demand, dry mat­ter, sen­sory qual­ity, phe­no­lic com­pounds and antiox­i­dant activ­ity of per­me­ate and retained sam­ples.

The dou­ble treat­ment of micro­fil­tra­tion and nanofil­tra­tion gen­er­ated a clean, liq­uid prod­uct that can be recy­cled as pro­cess­ing water, and reten­tate frac­tions with a low mol­e­c­u­lar weight which show a sig­nif­i­cant con­cen­tra­tion of phe­no­lic com­pounds. Depending on the degree of purity and on spe­cific sen­sory prop­er­ties these may be des­tined to the recov­ery of mol­e­cules with antiox­i­dant activ­ity or could be used in dif­fer­ent sec­tors such as fer­til­iz­ers pro­duc­tion, ani­mal nutri­tion and the food and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­tries.

The inte­grated process demon­strated to be a valid approach to pro­duce phe­nol extracts valu­able for sev­eral indus­try branches and the study’s results sug­gested that there is a ​“sus­tain­able hypoth­e­sis of ​‘nor­mal indus­trial prac­tice’ that can be included in cur­rent processes of oil extrac­tion, in order to purify water and recover phe­no­lic com­pounds with high added value.”

The research was pre­sented on the occa­sion of a meet­ing on tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion in the Calabrian at the exper­i­ment sta­tion of the Regional Agricultural Development Agency in Gioia Tauro, orga­nized by Apor (Calabrian olive oil pro­duc­ers’ asso­ci­a­tion) with the col­lab­o­ra­tion of Calabria Region, the University of Bologna and the Institute on Membrane Technology at the University of Calabria in Rende.

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