Citrus waste recovery to obtain mucilage and animal feed

This paper continues previous research on citrus wastes and describes a new method to utilize orange and lemon juice centrifugation pulp. This waste causes many economic and environmental problems due to its high water content, which makes it difficult to dry in industrial devices. The aim of the present research is to develop a new treatment (in addition to those using calcium oxide and pectolytic enzyme) to obtain a material that (after drying) could be utilized as a component of feedstuffs. This new treatment, with ammonium hydroxide, offers the added benefit of increasing nitrogen content. The product obtained via this process has a fairly high crude protein content and good total in vitro digestibility. Therefore, it could also be suitable as feed for no ruminants. As regards lemon pulp, we have also extracted mucilage as this polysaccharide is widely utilized by the food and pharmaceutical industry. In this work, we used ammonium hydroxide instead of calcium oxide in order to increase pH. In this case, the extraction residue could also be utilized as feedstuff.