Pretreatment of food waste by alkaline for sugar production

Abstract

It is well known that use of low cost and abundant waste materials in microbial fermentations can reduce product costs. Food wastes disposed of in large amounts from cafeterias, restaurants, dining halls, food processing plants and household kitchens contain high amounts of carbohydrates components such as glucose, starch and cellulose. There is increasing interest on the production of value-added products such as biofuel, biodiesel and platform chemicals from food waste in an environmental friendly and cost effective way. These processes are generally including the production of sugars either by chemical and biological methods followed by the fermentation of the produced sugars into value added products such as biofuels, organic acids, ethanol and enzymes. The production of high concentrations of sugars from food waste is the most challenging part in these processes. In order to improve the sugar production from food waste, this project will investigate the efficacy of alkaline as a pretreatment mean for sugar production. The general aim is to optimize the pretreatment conditions for improving the sugar production using Response Surface Methodology (RSM).