Chapter 3 - Fruit and vegetable wastes for biobased chemicals

Abstract

The necessity to develop cost-efficient and sustainable technologies that should allow us to replace fossil-based resources with means based on renewable biomass has lately increased the interest in the biological production of platform biobased chemicals. The fruits and vegetables rejected by the market along with the residual fractions derived from fruits and vegetable processing represent one of the most valuable sources of renewable biomass that can be efficiently exploited for the biotechnological production of biobased bulk chemicals useful for a variety of industries, such as food industry, bioplastic materials development, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, textile industry, and so on. Wastes based on fruits and vegetables are abound in healthy and nutritious elements, which can be either recovered through ecological ways or used directly for the microbial growth and the biosynthesis of important biobased chemicals by numerous microorganisms. In the present chapter, the focus is on the global overview of fruits and vegetable waste generation and on aspects related to the management of this type of wastes along with the sustainable alternatives of valorizing these fractions through biotechnological approaches as a basis for the production of biobased chemicals.