Sustainable utilization of Pea industry waste: A Step towards Food Security

Abstract

The food industries are producing huge quantity of waste, resulting from the production, preparation and consumption of food. Pea processing industry involves preserving peas by freezing and marketing them for seasonal limitation and producing a very high amount of waste as by-product. This huge waste causes significant environmental issues and economic losses. The present study was aimed to value addition and utilizes pea peel waste in an efficient way for developing biodegradable product.  Nutritional analysis 
revealed that waste pea peels have high nutritive value of crude protein (19.79%), and have good amount of ash (7.87%), fat (2.27%) and fibre (1.83%). The result revealed that the developed biodegradable film has good tensile strength (5.96 MPa), surface thickness 
(70 µm) and water solubility (2.46%). Therefore, biodegradable film can be the use as subsitude of synthetic plastic with the advantage of employment generation, energy recovery and livelihood security which ultimately leads to sustainable environment and development.