PRIN PNRR 2022 P2022Z59JH Biopolimers of hydroxy fatty acids from coffee grouns by ecofriendly chemistry (FABER)-Finanziamento dell’Unione Europea–NextGenerationEU – missione 4, componente 2, investimento 1.1-CUP: D53D23022140001

The increasing demand for consumable products is leading to an accumulation of waste without precedents. Particularly, biomasses deriving from food scraps represent a growing global issue, as they are hard to recycle and to dispose of. Coffee, as one of the most consumed beverages in the world, leads to the production of thousands of tonnes of waste yearly. Spent coffee grounds are a natural by-product of coffee consumption, but they are also rich in different biomolecules, such as carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and, because of that, they are drawing the attention of the scientific community. Alongside the implementation of these biomasses, there is an unstoppable need of creating new materials that could be easier to recycle and dispose of, hopefully using low impacting chemicals and deriving from natural sources scraps, in the view of creating a circular economy for the preservation of the planet. In this project, innovative synthetic and enzymatic methods will be assessed, in order to produce new and/or environment-friendly chemical bioproducts. Among all the different molecules that are present in spent coffee grounds, lipids drawn our attention. In fact, triacylglycerols and free fatty acids make up to 15% in weight of the biomass; fatty acids, on the other hand, are currently studied for their potential use as biopower sources, but their potential is yet to be fully assessed. One new fate for these molecules could be represented by the synthesis of new chemical entities, in this case α-hydroxy fatty acids. In addition to the use in many different fields, such as cosmetics, pharmaceutical, food and material industries, because of their surfactant and chelating abilities, α-hydroxy fatty acids could represent a valuable substrate for the production on new biocompatible and biodegradable polymers, whith new peculiar characteristics in comparison with polymers deriving from short chain α-hydroxy acids. The monomers of these polymers will be synthetized using two different approaches: chemical and enzymatic. Both these methods will be performed on the fatty acids extracted from spent coffee grounds, for the valorisation and recovery of the biomass. As far as it regards the purely chemical approach, the conversion of fatty acids to α-hydroxy fatty acids will be set and optimized using environmentally friendly solvents and reactants, in order to minimize the impact on the ecosystem that derives from the production of these compounds. Initially, the operating conditions for these modifications will be set starting from some of the fatty acids (saturated and unsaturated) found in the lipid portion of spent coffee grounds, thanks to an accurate analytical evaluation of the extracts.