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Sustainable utilization of eggshell through high-shear dispersion and enzymatic hydrolysis
The poultry industry faces a significant challenge due to the generation of waste, particularly eggshell waste, whose improper disposal impacts the environment and generates additional costs. This waste, composed of 95% calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) and interstitial membrane proteins (EMP), represents an opportunity to be valorized under a circular economy and sustainability approach. This work seeks to address the need to mitigate the environmental impacts of agro-industrial waste disposal, generate additional economic value, and reduce dependence on non-renewable sources for obtaining CaCO₃. Furthermore, protein recovery provides alternative sources of bioactive compounds, with potential applications in the food and pharmaceutical industries. The main objective of this document is to present the transformation alternatives of an agro-industrial waste such as eggshell through a low environmental impact mechanism such as high shear dispersion that does not involve chemicals or pollutants and the enzymatic hydrolysis process widely used to obtain bioactive compounds that operates under moderate conditions and with a certain degree of substrate specificity, allowing to obtain peptides with better nutritional value and techno-functional properties becoming an alternative for application in food. For this, the eggshell was sanitized, then the dry sample was crushed, samples with an average particle size between 180 and 250 µm were weighed, the system for high shear dispersion was prepared in ultraturrax, microbiological characterization, proximate composition and the physical properties of this material were determined. Subsequently, the dispersed samples were subjected to an enzymatic hydrolysis process with Alcalase 2.4L. The protein content, % degree of hydrolysis and antioxidant activity of the hydrolysates were determined using the ABTS, FRAP and ORAC methods.
