Waste Not: Novel Application of Olive Mill Waste as Food Antioxidant

The dis­posal of high wastage pro­duced from the extrac­tion of olive oil con­tin­ues to be a con­sid­er­able envi­ron­men­tal prob­lem for the Mediterranean coun­tries that gen­er­ate the major­ity of the global olive oil. As the great­est pro­ducer of olive oil in the world, Spain pro­duces more than 4 mil­lion tons of olive waste each year demand­ing a more viable approach for large scale man­age­ment of these wastes that exac­er­bate their destruc­tive impact on the envi­ron­ment and econ­omy.

At the same time, these waste prod­ucts con­tain high lev­els of polyphe­nols and other poten­tially renew­able resources for recy­cling that would be ben­e­fi­cial to the long-term well­be­ing of the envi­ron­ment.
See Also:Articles on Sustainable Olive Oil Production
While recent research stud­ies have pro­posed mul­ti­ple strate­gies for the prac­ti­cal val­oriza­tion of the olive oil waste such as com­bus­tion, sec­ondary oil extrac­tion and fer­men­ta­tion of the solid waste, nev­er­the­less strate­gies aimed at con­sol­i­da­tion of man­u­fac­tur­ers involved includ­ing agri­cul­tural, social and olive mill indus­tries would be essen­tial to sub­stan­tially reduce the envi­ron­men­tal impact.

Collaborative efforts of mul­ti­ple Spanish groups of researchers pro­duced just that. Scientists came up with a novel strat­egy to uti­lize olive oil waste that would prove to be envi­ron­men­tally friendly while at the same time directed at reduc­ing adverse eco­nomic impacts across mul­ti­ple indus­tries.

The researchers exam­ined the sta­bil­ity of lamb meat pat­ties in the pres­ence of olive waste extract as a nat­ural antiox­i­dant in a stan­dard high-oxy­gen cold stor­age envi­ron­ment for nine days. The results were quite impres­sive: After six days of stor­age the dis­col­oration, lipid and pro­tein oxi­da­tion of the meat pat­ties were all delayed sig­nif­i­cantly com­pared to the con­trols.

If this strat­egy is opti­mized and then imple­mented on a large scale, the clear win­ner here will be the envi­ron­ment. In addi­tion, the dual ben­e­fits of solv­ing the olive oil wastage man­age­ment will impact at least two major indus­tries. On the one hand, the meat indus­try can poten­tially increase the shelf-life of meat prod­ucts by reduc­ing oxi­da­tion result­ing in less food waste and its con­se­quent harm­ful envi­ron­men­tal effects.

On the other hand, as the authors sug­gested, ​“the olive oil indus­try would be encour­aged to fol­low an eco-friend­lier olive oil pro­duc­tion chain obtain­ing mar­ketable prod­ucts from the wastes gen­er­ated.” The authors fur­ther stated that ​“This strat­egy would val­orise olive oil wastes, leav­ing a remark­able by-prod­uct rather than just a waste, and at the same time min­imis­ing envi­ron­men­tal impact.”

In addi­tion to decreas­ing the olive oil wastage, the over­all reduc­tion of waste gen­er­a­tion would also ben­e­fit Spain con­sid­er­ably which in 2012 pro­duced an aston­ish­ing 8.3 mil­lion tons of ani­mal and veg­etable waste.

With the global increase in meat con­sump­tion pre­dicted to jump by 1.3 per­cent annu­ally over the next sev­eral years, the impli­ca­tions of these find­ings are timely for meat indus­tries to recu­per­ate their lost rev­enues as a con­se­quence of unac­cept­able meat dis­col­oration and oxi­da­tion induced by short shelf-life.

Finally, the authors sum­ma­rized the impor­tance of their find­ings as ​“the use of an olive waste extract to increase the shelf life of meat prod­ucts as a food waste pre­ven­tion strat­egy that is con­sid­ered the most favourable option within the food waste hier­ar­chy and, at the same time, would val­orize agri­cul­tural wastes.”

• Journal of Cleaner Production


• World Agriculture