Samuel Perez Vega

The world has been facing extraordinary events affecting society, the environment, and the economy. Global warming and the COVID-19 pandemic are some examples. The latter is a direct consequence of living in the Anthropocene, an era distinguished by the unpredictable effects caused on Earth by human activity. Nevertheless, more importantly, many of these changes are caused by specific activities inside processing systems affecting the stability of the biosphere into an alarming situation where a redesign is urgent. My future research considers incorporating robust sustainability indicators such as the planetary boundaries framework in food processing areas. The planetary boundaries framework extends LCA by including a safe operational space for system activities toward the most critical environmental pressures (EPs) affecting Earth. I found this framework necessary since it is possible to spot specific actions in a food production system and their effects for the following years.

Development of added value from cheap agricultural raw materials such as oat, apple pomace, citrus and broccoli waste, employing different extraction techniques such as supercritical fluid extraction (SFE), high pressures, and ultrasound to fractionate matrices into added value fractions such as polyphenols, protein, oil, and fiber. Compared to other conventional and nonconventional extraction techniques, SFE shows exciting features: high yield and selectivity, production of few or no waste, non or few solvents employed, extraction of bioactives with higher shelf life, no solvent residues in products or by-products, employment of environmental solvents such as scCO2. In addition, SFE allows for retaining various value-added bioactives from the same matrix through the biorefinery concept, opening opportunities for a more sustainable and economically feasible extraction process.

Another area of interest is the development of a sustainable process for turning cheap biomass or waste into highly nutritional food fractions, biofuels, and bioplastics by implementing the biorefinery concept. Some examples are the evaluation of oxygen transfer, the production of bioplastics such as PHB from whey from dairy industries, the production of bioethanol utilizing sotol bagasse as raw material, the production of hydrogen and fertilizer from a waste source, and the generation of ABE (acetone, butanol, ethanol) biofuels, and Coenzyme Q production from food waste.