WSEAS Transactions on Environment and Development
Print ISSN: 1790-5079, E-ISSN: 2224-3496
Volume 11, 2015
Complex Utilization of Dairy Waste (Whey) in Biorefinery
Authors: ,
Abstract: Whey is one of the most important industrial wastes. The annual worldwide milk collection and processing is around 622 Million tons [1], and the rest of the process is whey, which content and quality is determined by the dairy technology: while after cheese production sweet whey is the byproduct, skim and cottage cheese production results sour whey (poor in lactose). While pure sweet whey have several high added value containing commodities (for example for infants) with increasing demand and production, sour whey is usually combined, stored and handled together with primary washing waters of the facility and is transferred for final degradation. Since the latter one is poor in lactose and further diluted with washing streams, it is very difficult to utilize it. However, it still has high COD and TOC content resulting high cost of wastewater treatment and even high risk to the environment. For this reason we developed a complex utilization of such dairy waste streams for providing more products and less environment risk with less costs for the production site. We set up with the help of experiment supported process simulation (i.e. flowsheeting) a biorefinery concept, in which the low lactose content of this waste is converted into yeast biomass for ergosterol (i.e. previtamin D2) production, and the residual yeast debris of ergosterol section is combined with the lactic acid containing residual organic part of the used whey for application to propionic acid and vitamin B12 production. Our simulation study revealed, that with appropriate ratio between production lines “zero landfill” theory can be reached and valuable products with profit can be generated at the same time.
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Pages: 80-88
WSEAS Transactions on Environment and Development, ISSN / E-ISSN: 1790-5079 / 2224-3496, Volume 11, 2015, Art. #9