Agro-industrial Wastes as Bioactive Molecules Source

Sustainable use of renewable natural resources, through value addition, using biological life processes, is anideal transition from an oil-based economy to bioresource economy. Addressing climate change, renewableresources such as agro-industrial wastes, currently seen as low value materials, are in fact natural sources ofvalue-added compounds that can be used, for example, as economic sources of bioactive substances of highinterest for chemical, pharmaceutical and food industries. Moreover, agro-industrial by-products such as mostof organic effluents have a high organic load content and can be vaporizable through a gaseous energy carrierproduction (methane/hydrogen) and a digested flow for agricultural purposes, using anaerobic digestiontechniques. Once adopted, biological processes of these materials may contribute to reduce theenvironmental pollution burden.The present work refers to different procedures and methodologies applied to wastes valorisation that, within abiorefinery concept, had the achievement of valuable biomolecules as a core of the entire recovery linesystem. Several wastes/wastewaters mainly produced in the Mediterranean area were under study.