Separation of oil and carotenes from palm oil mill effluent by adsorption chromatography with silica based adsorbent

Abstract

Malaysia is an agricultural country and the major polluting industrial effluents have been from palm oil industry. Palm oil mill effluent (POME) is a liquid waste which causes a significant impact on the environment if it is not dealt properly. POME contains oil and carotenes that need to be treated before discharge. Owing to the readily available source of POME and growing demand of carotenes, the objective of this paper is to recover the carotenes from POME whilst tackling the environmental problem. In this study, solvent extraction is used to retrieve oil from POME and adsorption chromatography is further adopted to recover the carotenes contained in the oil. Residual oil extracted from POME in this study was about 5000 mg/L in a single stage solvent extraction. The carotenes content in recovered oil was about 450 ppm. Synthetic adsorbent with silica based material was used in the adsorption chromatography. Carotenes was concentrated to about 25 times of the concentration in the recovered oil by adsorption chromatography. Carotenes recovery was found to be depended on the process conditions. Different types of solvent, column temperatures and initial loading volumes were evaluated to determine the effects on the percentage of carotenes extracted and carotenes concentration. The suitable temperature for adsorption process was 40 °C. Carotenes was successfully concentrated from the recovered oil by adsorption chromatography process. © 2009 Curtin University of Technology and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.