Soluble Bio-based Substances Isolated From Urban Wastes

The increasing environmental concern of our society has resulted in the need for developing sustainable processes able to decrease waste production or, alternatively, to valorize them for other use. This latter concept fits with the biorefinery strategy, aiming to integrate different biomass conversion approaches to obtain fuels, power, heat, and value-added chemicals from biomass. In particular, organic materials such as compost, anaerobic digestate, and organic residues from mechanical-biological treatment of urban wastes can be used as biomass to feed a biorefinery. This is the innovative idea characterizing the project “Biomass Wastes as Renewable Source of Energy and Chemicals for the Industry with Friendly Environmental Impact. Optimizing use of Piemonte wastes bioenergy inventory,” financed in 2006 by the Regione Piemonte (Italy), and coordinated by the Chemistry Department of the Università di Torino (Italy). From the humid fraction of urban wastes soluble bioorganic substances (SBO) were isolated, whose chemical nature was demonstrated very similar to natural organic matter, such as humic substances. SBO show interesting physical and chemical properties, such as ability to decrease surface tension of water, photo-chemical activity under sunlight, and chelating capability for metals. Hence, SBO are good candidates to be used, in alternative to petroleum derived auxiliaries, in several fields such as textile industry, detergency, agriculture, polluted soil washing, wastewater treatment, and material chemistry. The perspective to recycle waste bio-based SBO in many processes would result in important economic and ecological advantages for industry and society. SBO are obtained from a cheap and easily available source, and their applications should be considered as green processes, as they are based on the reuse of a waste, and imply lower fossils consumption and lower concern for waste disposal. With this background, the aim of this book is to provide information about the use of SBO for different environmental purposes. This is the basis of a project financed by the European Union in the Seventh Framework Program as a Marie Curie action and entitled “Isolation, characterization and screening of environmental applications of bio-organic substances obtained from urban biomasses,” under the acronym of EnvironBOS, in which was exchanged the complementary expertise of research groups from Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (Spain), Università degli Studi di Torino (Italy), Universidad Nacional de La Plata (Argentina), and Universidade de Sao Paulo (Brasil). The purpose of this project was to identify, among the potential applications of environmental interest, those fields where the use of SBO appears more promising for application in the real case at industrial scale, in order to focus on them in the future research. Therefore the present book witnesses the fruitful collaboration of all the researchers involved in the EnvironBOS project.