Contact: Gary Chinga Carrasco
Sustainable Processing of Agrofood Residues to Elicitors and Chemicals
The SPAREC project focuses on sustainable processes from both an environmental and an economical point of view, addressing the concept of circular economy. It is designed using an integrated biorefinery concept, which ensures a comprehensive use of material and energetic resources, while food residues are valorized, reusing valuable components at the farm and at industrial level. Innovative solutions to waste streams in the wine and fruit juice industries are looked for in this project, extracting medium to high-added value mixtures that are or can be used as ingredients, chemicals and additives in the food; chemical and cosmetic industries; or as plant immune-system elicitors in green-houses and farms, reducing the need for agrochemicals. Processes to value-added products from wastes are physical, chemical, physicochemical, enzymatic and microbiologic, and products will be tested for their antioxidant and plant immune system elicitor capacity, this latter at lab, pilot-plant and field scales. Therefore, the proposed strategies will reduce waste treatment costs, while improving economics at the food industry and farm levels.
Therefore, the proposed strategies will reduce waste treatment costs, while improving economics at the food industry and farm levels.
Publications
2024
Journal Articles
Cano, M.E., Lindgren, Å., Rosendahl, J., Johansson, J., Garcia-Martin, A., Ladero Galan, M., Kovensky, J. and Chinga-Carrasco, G. (2024). Characterization of carboxylated cellulose nanofibrils and oligosaccharides from Kraft pulp fibers and their potential elicitor effect on the gene expression of Capsicum annuum. International Journal of Biological Macromolecules 267(2): 131229. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijbiomac.2024.131229
2020
Journal Articles
McDonagh, B. and Chinga-Carrasco, G. (2020). Characterization of Porous Structures of Cellulose Nanofibrils Loaded with Salicylic Acid. Polymers 12, 2538. https://doi.org/10.3390/polym12112538
Research partners and funding:
Research partners
Coordinated by: Prof. Victoria E. Santos – Complutense University, SPAIN
Complutense University (Coordinator, Spain), The National Institute for Agricultural and Food Research and Technology (Spain), PlantResponse S.L. (Spain), Pago de Carraovejas (Spain), RISE PFI AS (Norway), Université de Picardie Jules Verne and ELYS Conseil SASU (France), ASA Spezialenzyme GmbH (Germany)
Funding
The project is funded by the Research Council of Norway (Grant no. 284300) and SUSFOOD2 ERA-NET program.