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IFCE Foresees Possibility of Using Banana Peel in Pharmaceutical and Food Industries and Most Importantly: Replacing Some Petroleum Derivatives
Researchers from IFCE, the Federal Institute of Ceará, specifically at the Campus in Iguatu, Ceará, studied the repurposing of some substances from banana peels. One of the goals is to use banana peels in spaces in the food industry, as part of packaging composition or as a major substitute for petroleum-derived products in general.
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With the study on banana peels by IFCE, a substance called lignin was found, which is usually discarded from the fruit. According to researchers from Ceará, the substance from banana peels has potential applications in the pharmaceutical and food industries, as well as in the production sector, which currently uses petroleum derivatives to manufacture fertilizers, pesticides, concrete additives, and polymers.
According to IFCE professor Francisco Avelino, the process used in the study in Ceará was organosolv, on banana peels, which allows the separation of plant biomass into cellulose, lignin, and hemicellulose with a high degree of purity.
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According to Avelino, although banana peels were used as the basis for the study, lignin can also be found in other fruits and vegetables; however, in Iguatu, the production and planting of bananas are more predominant, favoring its use in research.
“Throughout Iguatu, especially in the Central-South region, there will always be large producers of the future substitute for petroleum. In this case, it is a domestic waste since the population consumes the fruit and ends up discarding the peel, as well as waste from industries since, in candy manufacturing, bananas are predominant, and the use of peels is discarded or repurposed in other industries, such as the production of fuel for ovens; furthermore, it is a poor application that wastes much of the chemical production of banana peels that could be used to generate energy,” highlighted the specialist.
Research at IFCE and the Oil Industry
According to Francisco Avelino, the research on the future substitute for petroleum began in August 2019 and was a project started with a student from the chemistry degree course at IFCE, Campus Iguatu, and then it needed to be replaced. Due to the arrival of the pandemic, the project was delayed and took just over a year to develop.
The research was funded by the Cearense Foundation for Scientific and Technological Development (FUNCAP), and, besides this, there were supports from the Federal University of Ceará (UFC) and also from Embrapa Agroindustrial Tropical.
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