Environmental and economic assessment of food additive production from mushroom bio-residues

This work analysed the environmental and economic impacts of extracts enriched in ergosterol and vitamin D2 production from bio-residues of Agaricus Bisporus mushrooms. The main hotspots of the extractive processes in environmental terms were identified through the standardized methodology Life Cycle Assessment. In respect to the economic analysis, the Material Flow Cost Accounting approach was applied to identify production costs, distinguishing between valued and wasted costs. The LCA results showed that electricity consumption is a key factor in environmental aspects, having the highest contribution to the process's environmental impact. In general, the most electricity-consuming unit processes analysed were lyophilization, extraction and evaporation. Despite evaporation being a process with great energy consumption, it also mitigates environmental impacts, since it allows solvent recovery through the extraction and reutilization phases in new iterations. The production costs for the identified extracts were determined: extract enriched in ergosterol (2.43€/1 g of extract) and extract enriched in vitamin D2 (8.28€/1 g of extract). Recovered solvent incorporation in posterior iterations resulted in a total cost decrease of about 47% for ergosterol-extract and about 39% for vitamin D2 extract. Solvent's recovery and reutilization allowed to not only reduce the environmental impacts but also the production costs.