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New Techniques for Treatment and Recovery of Valuable Products from Olive Mill Wastewater

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Handbook of Environmental Materials Management

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Abstract

The olive oil industries produce large quantities of wastewater having an enormous amount of pollutants that provide a deleterious effect on environment drastically if discharged without proper treatment. Despite its treatment throughout the extraction process, this liquid waste still contains a very important oily residue, always considered as a pollutant waste. In this context, a new upgrading technique has been developed for the treatment and valorization of olive mill wastewater (OMW), to ensure a better environmental protection and to contribute to the improvement of the profitability of the oleicol field through the recovery of a multiple valuable products.

This chapter reviews both the treatment and valuation of OMW:

The first objective of this study is to describe the treatment of OMW by electrocoagulation (EC) in a stirred tank reactor (STR); a variable order kinetic (VOK) derived from the Langmuir-Freundlich equation was developed to simulate the kinetics of the detoxification of OMW with EC using bipolar aluminum electrodes. The results showed good agreement between the predictive equation and the experimental data.

The second part of this work was intended to extract and separate two polyunsaturated free fatty acids, with high purity by a fractional crystallization with urea from OMW collected from three olive oil extraction processes (traditional, modern, and semimodern). A comparative study was investigated with different OMW samples. By centrifugation, the oily phase would be extracted from OMW, which is destined to be a platform to obtain two fatty acids (oleic and linoleic acid), and to ensure total valorization of our effluent, a complementary process was carried out for production of a high quality soap, glycerol, and polyphenols.

Finally, a pilot plant was designed and developed for a full olive harvesting period (100 days), in one of the biggest olive production areas of Morocco, in order to carry out a socioeconomic study, which consists in studying the feasibility of OMW valuation project for the local olive oil extraction processes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry and Valorisation, Faculty of Sciences Ain-Chock, HASSAN II University of Casablanca, 5366 Maarif, BP, Casablanca, Morocco

    Reda Elkacmi

  2. Department of Process Engineering, National School of Mineral Industries of Rabat, 753 Agdal, BP, Rabat, Morocco

    Reda Elkacmi & Mounir Bennajah

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  1. Reda Elkacmi
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  2. Mounir Bennajah
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Chemistry and EVSC, New Jersey InstTech, 151 D Tiernan-NJIT Dept. of Chemistry and EVSC, Newark, New Jersey, USA

    Chaudhery Mustansar Hussain

Section Editor information

  1. Department of Chemistry and Environmental Sciences, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, USA

    Chaudhery Mustansar Hussain Ph. D

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Elkacmi, R., Bennajah, M. (2018). New Techniques for Treatment and Recovery of Valuable Products from Olive Mill Wastewater. In: Hussain, C. (eds) Handbook of Environmental Materials Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58538-3_157-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58538-3_157-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-58538-3

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