EXPLORATION OF ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTALLY BENEFICIAL APPROACH FOR WASTE SHELL FRACTIONATION

In the last decades, the global fish production has grown vigorously. With such tremendous production, huge quantities of wastes are generated annually, especially the shells from crustacean animals. Every year, around 6-8 million tons of crustacean shells are produced globally-about 1.5 million tons in Southeast Asia alone. Unfortunately, the tremendous amount of crustacean shells are dumped or in landfill without utilization. Nevertheless, a limited portion is used to produce chitin and its derivatives (e.g. chitosan) via problematic methods. Herein, we put forward a newly developed method for the fractionation of waste shells to address the issues of the current industrial extraction method. The proposed method is economically and environmentally beneficial with high efficiency by using water or urea solutions for deproteinization and high pressure CO2 for demineralization. The chitin product after the process has a high purity which was systematically characterized by various techniques. Life cycle analysis has been conducted to examine the economic and environmental impacts of the developed method in comparison with the conventional one.

Author dc:creator

• YANG HUIYING

• Biomass, Green chemistry