Valorization of palm oil mill sterilization condensate via synergistic green reactive extraction of bioactive compounds

Abstract

Palm oil mill (POM) sterilization condensate is recognized as the source of polyphenols with interesting biological activities, for example, inflammatory processes prevention, UV protection, antioxidant, antimicrobial, and anticarcinogen. Reactive extraction is one of the promising methods for bioactive compounds (polyphenols) recovery offering various merits such as simple, efficient, easy to scale up, and high selectivity. In this work, reactive extraction of polyphenols from POM sterilization condensate using synergistic organic formulation was investigated. The extraction was performed by screening several base and synergist extractants using palm cooking oil as a green diluent. The results showed that about 85% of polyphenols were extracted using 0.25 M 1-Octanol and 0.05 M Aliquat 336 with a synergistic coefficient of 2.59. Meanwhile, the back-extraction study demonstrated that 0.3 M NaOH was selected as the most appropriate stripping agent where almost 100% of stripping performance was achieved. Therefore, the synergistic green formulation offers great potential for polyphenols recovery from POM sterilization condensate.