Researchers Develop a Method to Retrieve the Sugar in Olive Pits

The high quality of the raw material, mostly glucose, allows its use in food and pharmaceutical applications.
By Paolo DeAndreis
Jan. 21, 2021 12:22 UTC

Eighty-three per­cent of the sugar found in olive pits can be effi­ciently retrieved and, thanks to the high qual­ity of the raw mate­r­ial extracted, it can then be used in sev­eral dif­fer­ent indus­trial processes.

Researchers at the University of Jaén has devised a new method they believe will appeal to the food and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try as well as the bio­fu­els sec­tor.

In a note pub­lished by the University, researchers explained that those results depend on a two-step pro­ce­dure: An acid solu­tion is used to sep­a­rate the con­tents of the olive pit before the chem­i­cal bonds are bro­ken down so that the new com­pounds may emerge.

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This tech­nique saves most of the sug­ars involved, and that means a greater poten­tial for the derived bio­log­i­cal prod­ucts,” explained Eulogio Castro, co-author of the study pub­lished by the Industrial Crops and Products jour­nal.

More specif­i­cally, the glu­cose retrieved by the new pro­ce­dure is trans­formed into derived bio-prod­ucts among which the sci­en­tists cited bio-ethanol, an effi­cient bio-fuel com­pound, xyl­i­tol, a widely used sweet­ener, and lac­tic acid, which is a base for the pro­duc­tion of sev­eral macro-mol­e­cules.

As a result of the com­bined pre­treat­ment under the selected oper­a­tion con­di­tions,” the researchers reported, an over­all sugar pro­duc­tion yield of 83 per­cent of the total sugar con­tent in raw olive stones can be obtained, tak­ing into account the dif­fer­ent sugar streams gen­er­ated along the whole process.”

The next step for the engi­neers and researchers is to apply the new method to much higher vol­umes of olive pits. The pro­ce­dure will be inte­grated within a bio-refin­ery plant where tra­di­tional energy sources are sub­sti­tuted by renew­able sources.

The study is part of a three-year-long project car­ried out in Madrid by the CIEMAT (Centre for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research) titled Progress towards a flex­i­ble bio-refin­ery of raw mate­ri­als and prod­ucts in regions with a high den­sity of agro-indus­trial bio­mass: case of the olive grove.”



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