In California, waste from Chick-fil-A’s lemon juice supplier could one day be used to produce bioplastics.
Bay Center Foods, which provides all of the lemon juice used by the popular fast food chain, has a zero-waste processing philosophy, Kurt Cahill, Executive Director, Upstream Production Solutions, at Bay Center Foods tells Food and Drink. Currently, the company extracts oil from lemon peels that is then purified and sold to perfumers and flavor houses, Cahill said. The rest is used as animal feed.
However, researchers are experimenting with other applications for the waste,” Cahill added. “We took the lemon peel and dried it into a powder, ground into a powder, and we made a compostable bioplastic out of it,” Cahill said.