Bread residues conversion into lactic acid by alkaline hydrothermal

treatments
By: Cristina Sánchez, Luis Serrano, Rodrigo Llano-Ponte, Jalel Labidi

Bread is the most vital element in a human diet. It is consumed almost everywhere in the world.
Since it is produced in large amounts, thus a large amount of residue will also be obtained from
it. Reasons of residue can be leaving out crust of bread during consumption, ill storage
management, or poor quality bread. Bread is produced from fermentation (breaking down
complex compounds into simpler ones) by yeast on sugar to carbon dioxide. It mainly contains
starch, and starch is a useful element as it can be used for energy storage or can be converted
to useful chemicals like lactic acid, ethanol, etc. Lactic acid can be produced from starch by
fermentation, but the process is slow and complicated. The better method of producing lactic
acid is Hydrothermal Process (crystallizing substances from high-temperature aqueous
solutions at high vapor pressures) using alkali like NaOH, KOH, Ca(OH)2, LiOH and K2CO3 as
catalysts.

Initially, a piece of bread is reduced to pieces of less than 0.5 mm, and then various tests were
run over it to determine its composition. Moisture content was determined by putting it up in an
oven at 80 C, elemental analysis was done using an Elemental Analyser, and starch content
were found using spectrophotometry. It was found that the bread contains 5.6% moisture, 75%
starch, and elemental analysis as “C: 43.14%, H: 7.24%, N: 2.36%, O: 47.26%”. After that, it
was subjected to the hydrothermal process using an alkali as a catalyst. 2g of bread with 50 ml
of alkaline was made, and various experiments were done over it varying the alkali. NaOH
(98%), KOH (85%), Ca (OH)2 (95–100%), LiOH (98–100%) and K2CO3 (99%) solutions (0.5 M)
were used as alkaline catalysts. Sodium, Calcium, and Potassium Hydroxide presented the
highest alkali yield (14.41 ± 0.31, 14.79 ± 0.45 and 14.15 ± 0.69 g/L). The lowest lactic acid
yield was obtained when the hydrothermal experiment was performed without any alkali (using
water as catalyst), depicting that the process with an alkali performs better than the traditional
hydrothermal process. After finding out which alkali is better, experiments were performed by
varying the concentration from 0 to 1 M for NaOH and KOH and 0 to 3.5 M for Ca(OH)2. It was
found that KOH obtained a maximum yield of around 38 % at 0.4 M, NaOH obtained its
maximum yield of around 35 % at 0.6 M and Ca(OH)2 obtained its maximum yield of around 72
% at 3.5 M. Therefore, Ca(OH)2 should be preferred for greater yield at large expense of alkali.
In contrast, KOH should be preferred when moderate alkali is to be used.

Hydrothermal treatment of starch produced not only lactic acid but also some useful byproducts.
When KOH was used as an alkali, 4.93 ± 0.25 g/L formic acid and 2.06 ± 0.38 g/L acetic acid
were produced while in the case of NaOH, 4.69 ± 0.34 g/L of formic acid and 1.99 ± 0.17 g/L of
acetic acid was produced. Glucose, ethanol, acrylic acid, arabinose, xylitol, and xylose were
also obtained but in minimal quantities. For the case of Ca(OH)2, 1.21 ± 0.06 g/L of arabinose,
0.75 ± 0.13 g/L of xylitol, 4.00 ± 0.21 g/L of formic acid, 3.09 ± 0.18 g/L of acetic acid, 1.07 ±
0.05 g/L of acrylic acid and 1.16 ± 0.08 g/L of ethanol were obtained. The amount of major
byproduct in Ca(OH)2 was still lower than the amount obtained in the case of NaOH and KOH.
This leads to the conclusion that when catalyst concentration is higher, more degradable
byproducts will be formed.

Thus, the production of lactic acid from bread residue is a promising method with Ca(OH)2 as
alkali as it produces 73 % yield and other useful byproducts like formic acid, acetic acid, etc.