CEST2025

Adopting Circular Economy practices reduces waste and aligns with EU priorities on prevention, reuse, and recycling. Italy, the EU's second-largest agricultural producer, faces challenges like food waste and climate change impacts. In 2022, Italy's fruit crop volumes grew by 7%, with 15% increase in citrus prices. The italian industry of orange juice creates every year over 55 million tons of orange peel waste (OPW), i.e., a mixture of pulp, seeds, and peel accounting for up to 60% of the fresh citrus weight. This large amount of OPW is usually managed by applying different technologies, as the extraction of active components for cosmetic applications, thermochemical (mostly incineration) or biological processes (e.g., anaerobic digestion and/or composting), or recycled into animal feed. Innovative perspectives for recycling OPW, already mature at industrial scale, involve the production of materials for various applications, as biodegradable biocomposite materials used for manufacturing design objects, eco-leather. In these applications OPW is usually combined with other materials. The aim of this study is an assessment of the mentioned OPW valorization perspectives based on technical and environmental performance indicators. In details, resource inflow/outflow circularity indicators, energy circularity indicators and material productivity indicators; respectively specify the fractions of material that are reused in the inflow/outflow, net consumed energy qualifies as renewable, and the ratio of revenue generated by total mass of all linear resource inflows. In conclusion, agricultural waste is increasingly replacing raw materials in production processes, and continued investment in research is essential to improve manufacturing methods and create useful products with increasing amounts of agricultural waste.