On the Purification of Agro-Industrial Wastewater by Membrane Technologies: The Case of Olive Mill Effluents

The olive oil production is one of the main industrial activities in the Mediterranean Basin: Italy, Portugal, Greece, and Northern African countries—Syria, Algeria, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, and Egypt. Also, France, Serbia and Montenegro, Macedonia, Cyprus, Turkey, Israel, and Jordan produce a considerable annual yield. Moreover, it is an emergent agro-food industry in China, the USA, Australia, the Middle East, and China, which is expected to develop a considerable production potential. Hence, the treatment of olive mill effluents is a task of global concern. In this context, advanced separation technologies comprising membranes and adsorption resins have been a breakthrough in terms of advanced separation and purification technologies, but many aspects are still in development or under investigation. In this chapter, a focus on the use of membrane and ion adsorption technologies for the purification of these wastewaters will be given. The effect of different factors comprising the type of membrane, i.e., ultrafiltration, nanofiltration, and reverse osmosis; the type of adsorbent (waste material, resins); and the operating conditions will be addressed. Conventional treatments are not able to abate the high concentration of dissolved species present in these effluents. The use of these technologies can be a feasible solution if properly engineered

Food chain inefficiency (FCI) : accounting conversion efficiencies across entire food supply chains to re-define food loss and waste

Achieving global food security requires a new approach that integrates not only all aspects of the growing, harvesting and processing of food (necessary to ensure sufficient affordable and sustainable production to alleviate hunger) but also the complexities associated with food consumption including deterring unhealthy overconsumption. Inefficiencies occur at various points along the agri-food supply chain but at present they are inadequately conceptualized via separate accounts of food loss, food waste, supply chain management, and public health. Here we re-define food loss and waste through the concept of conversion efficiency applied to the entire system, an approach up to now only applied to the primary processes of crop productivity. Nine conversion efficiencies are defined: sunlight capture efficiency; photosynthesis use efficiency; biomass allocation efficiency; harvesting efficiency; storage and distribution efficiency; processing efficiency; retailing efficiency; consumption efficiency; and dietary efficiency. Using the production and consumption of bread in the UK as an example, we demonstrate how efficiencies may be estimated and thus where the main inefficiencies lie, so indicating where the most significant improvements could be made. We suggest that our approach, which introduces the term Food Chain Inefficiency (FCI) to re-define food loss and waste, provides a rational and effective way to devise the practical interventions and policies needed to deliver a sustainable agri-food system

Milk oligosaccharides: a review

Milk oligosaccharides (OSs) confer unique health benefits to the neonate. Although human digestive enzymes cannot degrade these sugars, they support specific commensal microbes and act as decoys to prevent the adhesion of pathogenic micro-organisms to gastrointestinal cells. The limited availability of human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) impedes research into these molecules and their potential applications in functional food formulations. Recent studies show that complex OSs with fucose and N-acetyl neuraminic acid (key structural elements of HMO bioactivity) also exist in caprine milk, suggesting a potential source of bioactive milk OSs suitable as a functional food ingredient

A922 Sequential measurement of 1 hour creatinine clearance (1-CRCL) in critically ill patients at risk of acute kidney injury (AKI)

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On the Recent Use of Membrane Technology for Olive Mill Wastewater Purification

Many reclamation treatments as well as integrated processes for the purification of olive mill wastewaters (OMW) have already been proposed and developed but not led to completely satisfactory results, principally due to complexity or cost-ineffectiveness. The olive oil industry in its current status, composed of little and dispersed factories, cannot stand such high costs. Moreover, these treatments are not able to abate the high concentration of dissolved inorganic matter present in these highly polluted effluents. In the present work, a review on the actual state of the art concerning the treatment and disposal of OMW by membranes is addressed, comprising microfiltration (MF), ultrafiltration (UF), nanofiltration (NF), and reverse osmosis (RO), as well as membrane bioreactors (MBR) and non-conventional membrane processes such as vacuum distillation (VD), osmotic distillation (OD) and forward osmosis (FO). Membrane processes are becoming extensively used to replace many conventional processes in the purification of water and groundwater as well as in the reclamation of wastewater streams of very diverse sources, such as those generated by agro-industrial activities. Moreover, a brief insight into inhibition and control of fouling by properly-tailored pretreatment processes upstream the membrane operation and the use of the critical and threshold flux theories is provided