Value Added Products from Fruit Waste: A Systematic Review

Food waste contains hazardous compounds that can impact the growth of plants, polluting drinking water, impacting sea life to ultimately contaminating human food consumption. With approximately 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted per annum, there is need to mitigate the impact of waste from the different food processing sectors. Specifically, making use of waste from the vegetable and fruit processing sectors is a significant, albeit difficult, task in food sustainability. Numerous studies have explored the potential use of discarded fruits, including their waste materials, for further industrial purposes. Also, the extraction of functional ingredients, ex-traction of bioactive components, and fermentation of food waste from the vegetable and fruit sector is now the subject of extensive research. This is a systematic review of a selection of a range of relevant original studies that assess the potential of upcycling food waste (particularly fruit waste) – turning food waste into ingredient item/s to produce value added consumer products. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) 2020 guidelines underpins the method applied to the identification, eligibility evaluation and final se-lection of relevant studies. Findings from the review show the potential of repur-posing fruit waste, using different methods, into added-value material for a wide range of products such as bioethanol, biohydrogen, ethanol, fertilisers, bio-oil and sanitary pads.