Utilisation of Fruit and Vegetable Wastes - An Alternative for the Improvement of the Environment

Abstract

The large and increasing amount of waste generated each year in most industrialized countries has raised concerns about its treatment and disposal. A large proportion comes from the waste of fruits and vegetables, turning them into potential pollutant. Microbial technology proves to be a critical tool to combat the problem of organic waste management. Fruit and vegetable wastes have high perishability thus handling and disposal are quite critical to community acceptance. Since they have very high moisture contents, microbial technology, is the most suitable conversion technology to treat fruit and vegetable wastes. Wastes like potato, peas, cauliflower, cabbage, beans, orange, papaya and banana procured from local market served as substrates for the studies. Growth of Enterococcus faecium, a potentially useful probiotic organism, was done on these substrates. Various parameters like pH, temperature, inoculation volume, flask volume and incubation time were optimized. Among the various substrates examined, it was inferred that papaya and banana waste found suitable for the maximum growth. The temperature optimum for the substrates were recorded as 37°C at an optimum of pH 7.0 for both the substrates. Other parameters optimized were inoculation volume 10%, incubation time 24 hrs and flask volume 300ml.Further studies were done on optimization w.r.t the concentration of waste and combination of some nutrient for increasing the growth and 20 % waste along with 1% glucose showed highest growth. Studies have been done on the effect of selected waste materials in general environment. Soil moisture content were analysed for the soil having these dumped wastes and were found to be 41.091%which is 28.748% higher than normal value. The biological studies have shown that when soil contains waste materials having high organic content the bacterial and fungal content of the soil has greatly increased. This study presents a novel-economical approach for the bioconversion of fruit and vegetable wastes for the production of probiotics that is industrially significant. Enormous amount of garbage produced in India is a huge problem in terms of disposal and handling. Therefore, an effort have been made here to utilize fruit and vegetable waste for generation of some useful product........