From waste to food: Optimising the breakdown of oil palm waste to provide substrate for insects farmed as animal feed

Elizabeth Dickinson, Mark Harrison, Marc Parker, Michael Dickinson, James Donarski, Adrian Charlton, Rosie Nolan, Aida Rafat, Florence Gschwend, Jason Hallett, Maureen Wakefield and Julie Wilson

PLOS ONE, 2019, vol. 14, issue 11, 1-22

Abstract: Waste biomass from the palm oil industry is currently burned as a means of disposal and solutions are required to reduce the environmental impact. Whilst some waste biomass can be recycled to provide green energy such as biogas, this investigation aimed to optimise experimental conditions for recycling palm waste into substrate for insects, farmed as a sustainable high-protein animal feed. NMR spectroscopy and LC-HRMS were used to analyse the composition of palm empty fruit bunches (EFB) under experimental conditions optimised to produce nutritious substrate rather than biogas. Statistical pattern recognition techniques were used to investigate differences in composition for various combinations of pre-processing and anaerobic digestion (AD) methods. Pre-processing methods included steaming, pressure cooking, composting, microwaving, and breaking down the EFB using ionic liquids. AD conditions which were modified in combination with pre-processing methods were ratios of EFB:digestate and pH. Results show that the selection of pre-processing method affects the breakdown of the palm waste and subsequently the substrate composition and biogas production. Although large-scale insect feeding trials will be required to determine nutritional content, we found that conditions can be optimised to recycle palm waste for the production of substrate for insect rearing. Pre-processing EFB using ionic liquid before AD at pH6 with a 2:1 digestate:EFB ratio were found to be the best combination of experimental conditions.

Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0224771 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 24771&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0224771

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0224771

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().