Sustainable technologies for the analysis of bioactive compounds in agri-food products: an integrated approach for sustainability assessment

Agri-food systems (FSs) address 'one of the basic human needs' to ensure a steady food supply (intended as food security), food safety, and quality, thus guaranteeing dietary-balanced variety, while reducing related – environmental impacts. It is worth mentioning that FSs generate about 16 Gt CO2 eq., thus representing an average contribution of 31% to global anthropogenic GHGs. In this framework, the Ph.D. research project aims to valorize the main representative agri-food products and related by-products of the Italian Market (i.e., durum wheat, pasta, wine, olive oil, etc.), through an integrated approach for sustainability assessment. In particular, the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology, using SimaPro 9.5. software has proven to be a useful tool for assessing the environmental performances of major agri-food products and processes, identifying critical hotspots in up- and downstream activities, thus foreseeing possible waste-recovery strategies to mitigate impacts along the food chain. Moreover, within the field of sustainability, quality assessment of different food samples was carried out using emerging and sustainable methods, such as Ultrasound-Assisted Extraction (UAE), Deep Eutectic Solvents (DESs), for the sustainable extraction of target analytes from agri-food products and by-products, focusing on both analytical parameters as well as sustainability performances. In particular, the project investigated the analysis and analytical determination of different food bioactive compounds (BCs), namely polyphenols, antioxidants, biogenic amines (BAs), as well as essential fatty acids (EFAs), that are naturally occurring compounds, exerting both health-promoting properties on human health (i.e., prevention of cancer and cardiovascular diseases, etc.), as well as being valuable product and/or process markers for food quality. However, to mitigate intrinsic drawbacks for the environment and operator safety, (i.e., flammability, high toxicity, and non-biodegradability), related to conventional procedures, the use of alternative methods (i.e., UAE), and green solvents (i.e., DES) has been proposed. To this end, the implementation of a comparative LCA has enabled the quantification of environmental impacts, thus representing real-time analysis for pollution prevention in the product or process design.