Characterization of banana crop's by-products

Abstract

Banana crops produce a great amount of wastes, due to the fact that each plant only produces fruits once in its life. In Canary Islands 400 million kilos of banana are produced each year and for each ton of fruit, around 4 tons of pseudostem are generated, as the main waste, that are frequently left at the harvest location undergoing natural degradation. Mechanical fibre extraction is one of the most relevant alternatives for pseudostem valorization but this process still produces another material, Banana’s pseudostem pulp (BPP) as a byproduct. In this work, the characterization of this material (BPP), as well as the rachis fraction has been carried out using different protocols. Both materials presented an interesting chemical composition, with a high content of polysaccharides and low content of lignin, which makes it particularly interesting for the biorefinery’s biochemical platform. Some differences could be found when different protocols were used, underlining that TGA and FTIR are fast techniques but only qualitative information can be obtained from them.