Integrated Biorefinery Strategy for Orange Juice By-products Valorization: A Sustainable Protocol to Obtain Bioactive Compounds

Orange juice represents one of the main orange fruit consumption worldwide, and during this process, about 50% of the fresh fruit weight remains as by-products. These by-products comprise mainly peels and pulps, known as pomace, rich in bioactive compounds (BCs) such as essential oils, phenolic compounds (mainly hesperidin), and pectin. These BCs provide various health benefits, like antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-microbial, anti-cancerous, cardioprotective, and immuno-modulatory properties, as ingredients for food, nutraceutical, and pharmaceutical industries. Therefore, the use of orange by-products as feedstock in an innovative and sustainable route provides a unique opportunity for high-quality value-added ingredients production and is a promising trend to minimize waste deposition. Furthermore, multiproduct recovery can increase the economic viability of recycling by-products and potentially alleviate climate challenges. Therefore, this chapter describes an integrated biorefinery protocol for recovery in a circular economy framework of three different BCs from orange juice by-products: essential oils, hesperidin rich-polyphenol extract, and pectin through the application of sustainable methods with a high yield of extractions.