Quantifying environmental impacts associated to sodium alginate extraction from seaweed

Pedro Villanueva-Rey (1) , Paula Perez-Lopez (2) , Stephen K Herbert (3) , Gumersindo D Feijoo (4) , Maria Teresa Moreira (4)

1 Department of Chemical Engineering - Institute of Technology
2 O.I.E. - Centre Observation, Impacts, Énergie
3 Office of Basic Energy Sciences SC-22.1/Germantown Building, U.S. Department of Energy. 1000 Independence Avenue, SW, Washington, D.C
4 Department of Chemical Engineering, Institute of Technology

Seaweeds have been harvested along coast line for different purposes. Potential uses of harvested seaweeds depend on the type, being used either as food for human consumption, feed for aquaculture sector, or fertilizers due to their nutrients content. Kelps —which grow along the West coast of the United States— present a high ratio of sodium alginate within their cell walls, a compound widely used by pharmaceutical and food industries because of its features: viscosity, gel and film formation capacity (FMC Corporation, 2015). This fact explains the increasing interest of extracting alginate from this seaweed at industrial level. During the last five years, several projects aiming at establishing an industry around the

Domaines: Ingénierie de l'environnement; Développement durable

Pedro Villanueva-Rey, Paula Perez-Lopez, Stephen K Herbert, Gumersindo D Feijoo, Maria Teresa Moreira. Quantifying environmental impacts associated to sodium alginate extraction from seaweed. LCM 2017 (8th international conference on Life Cycle Management), Sep 2017, Luxembourg, Luxembourg. ⟨hal-01682195⟩