Valorizing potato peel waste: an overview of the latest publications

Abstract

The highly acclaimed exhaustion of fossil sources explored as raw materials for the production of energy, commodities, and materials is getting closer. It is, therefore, imperative to allocate resources to the research and development of alternatives, preferably, focusing our targets on those that are more sustainable and with a minor ecological impact than the existing ones. Being this agricultural wastes cost effective, renewable and abundant, the use of such residues as alternatives has been envisaged, and investigated. Worldwide, potato production has been increasing up to more than 300 M/year, creating a problem concerning the management of the industrial waste resulting from potato peeling, the potato peel waste (PPW). The identification of environmentally friendly and sustainable solutions for the mitigation of such waste have been explored and reported. In this short review, covering the last 5 years, the peer-reviewed papers focusing the use of PPW for the development of added-valuable solutions are assembled. The purpose of this manuscript is not to present a detailed, exhaustive, and comprehensive description of each study, not even to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the published work. Instead, a broad view and a shortened update of state of the art is offered. This broad and summarized survey present the research that has been conducted in recent years concerning the use of the PPW for the development of solutions to mitigate its environmental impact.