1 Introduction

Currently, it can be observed that global sustainability challenges are all closely interconnected, such as pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, poverty, energy, and food security. As stated by Liu et al. [1], only holistic and disruptive approaches integrating various components of human and natural systems are effective in identifying and proposing suitable solutions for these challenges, especially those related to research, development, and innovation (RD&I) in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary studies. To exemplify this systemic view, Fig. 1 illustrates the Earth surface that, based on the “Dymaxion map” (the Fuller Projection Map), shows the planet as a continuum without splitting any continents, seas, and oceans, where cycles are integrated through flows of matter, energy, and information [1, 2]. Here, Brazil, China, the Caribbean, and Africa interact across space, time, and organizational levels in many ways. For instance, the expansion of soybean production aggravates deforestation in Brazil, but also provides food and feedstock to China. The food trade between both countries also affects other areas, including the Caribbean and Africa. Dust particles from the Sahara Desert, also increased due to unbalanced agricultural practices, can reach the Caribbean and have an impact on coral reefs and soil fertility, diminishing tourism in this region. In addition, nutrient-rich particles from Africa can reach Brazil, improving its forest productivity.

Fig. 1
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Adapted from [1]

Representation of an integrated planetary flow system based on the Dymaxion map, emphasizing some coupled cycles related to food production and socio-environmental impacts among (1) Brazil, (2) China, (3) the Caribbean, and (4) the Sahara Desert.

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According to the Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations [3], after years of progress, world hunger has increased since 2015. Around 60% of the world’s starving people are from countries affected by conflict and climate change, including northeast Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen with 20 million people, often suffering extreme climatic events such as droughts and floods. Not surprisingly, some of the FAO’s top priorities for the next 2 years include topics such as sustainable agriculture, climate change mitigation and adaptation, water scarcity and support of subsistence rural practices, and fisheries and forestry [3, 4]. The challenges related to this demanding context can be intensified and better understood when taking into account that the world population is expected to increase by about 30% over the next 35 years, reaching more than 9.5 billion people in 2050 and 11.2 billion in 2100 [5].

As pointed out by Xia et al. [6], the global food waste of approximately 1.3 billion tons per year is shocking in this context and, although it should be avoided or minimized, it cannot be completely prevented nowadays. Primary and secondary processing generates unpreventable food supply chain waste. This can be due to a number of factors along the supply chain, differing by the commodity and country in question. In general terms, developing countries such as some African countries suffer the greatest loss during the early, upstream part of the primary processing, corresponding to 75% of food losses during production and postharvest. Various initiatives, e.g., building better infrastructure through knowledge transfer (more efficient storage and transport technologies) and improving collaboration and market opportunities in the food supply chain could have a positive role. In industrialized countries, waste occurs especially in the consumption stage, accounting for 50% of overall loss of crops in some countries of North America, Europe, and Oceania. In this case, together with educational and cultural actions, other aspects such as developing legislation to make date labels more user-friendly for consumers (sell-by, best-before, and consume-by), redesigning packaging characteristics (avoiding the “buy 1 get 2” offers) and retailer marketing strategies should be considered [7].

It is estimated that around 140 billion tons of biomass from the agricultural sector are generated every year in the world [8, 9], and a considerable part is recognized as waste and not conflicting with food availability, e.g., leaves, roots, stalks, bark, bagasse, straw residues, seeds, wood and animal residues. Using alternative strategies to avoid additional losses and produce several high value-added chemicals could minimize the volume of non-renewable materials used today (i.e., roughly 50 billion tons of fossil fuels), enough to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on non-sustainable resources. Therefore, considering their available volume and practically low costs locally and globally, associated to rich function, structure and chemical heterogeneity, all agro-industrial waste should also be considered for their chemical and material potential, as well as a source of energy [10,11,12,13].

An important proposal related to waste hierarchy as a framework for residue management can be seen in Fig. 2 [14, 15], which was reformulated to include agro-industrial waste. In this case, the agro-industrial waste hierarchy has a different meaning from top to bottom, since all biomass is valued as raw material. ‘Prevention’ is an intrinsic part of optimized processes, avoiding overproduction. Therefore, the least probable option is ‘disposal’ as the supply chain is designed to attend sustainable consumption, using all bio-based material generated. Here, sustainable production also includes eco-efficiency, cleaner and green productivity, whereas sustainable consumption allows greener choices to be made by individuals based on eco-procurement, supply chain management, waste minimization, recycling, and resource efficiency measures. Both sustainable production and consumption comprises ‘life-cycle thinking’, aiming at preventing problems shifting from one life-cycle stage to another, one geographical area or environmental compartment to another.

Fig. 2
figure 2

The agro-industrial waste hierarchy modified from [15]. The main idea is to promote sustainable production and consumption systems through zero-waste biorefinery

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One of the most important and cited references highlighting the advances in genetics, biotechnology, process chemistry, and engineering that has helped establish a new manufacturing concept to convert renewable biomass into valuable fuels and products, known as biorefinery, was published by Ragauskas and collaborators in the mid-2000s [16]. According to these authors and other researchers [16, 17], integrating biomass and biorefinery technologies has the potential to develop sustainable bio-based energy and materials leading to a new manufacturing paradigm (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3
figure 3

Holistic biorefinery model integrating biomass, biofuel, biomaterials and bioenergy cycle, based on green and sustainable technologies in the scope of bioeconomy and circular economy. Updated and expanded from [16, 17]

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In fact, this paradigm is currently connected to other strong concepts, i.e., bioeconomy and circular economy; the latter is described as an industrial system that is restorative by intention and design. This idea replaces the end-of-life notion with regeneration, focusing on the use of renewable energy, elimination of toxic chemicals, reutilization, return and eradication of “waste through the superior design of materials, products, systems, and business models” [18, 19].

As can be noted, new generations of biorefinery combine innovative biomass resources from different origins, chemical extraction and purification and/or synthesis of biomaterials, biofuels and bioenergy via benign processes. From the very beginning, the identification and quantification of all potentially high value-added compounds that could be removed from the available renewable feedstocks requires another analytical approach, also connected to green chemistry [20, 21].

2 From Green to Sustainable Separation: Towards Holistic, Flexible, and Zero-Waste Biorefineries

More recently, green extraction and purification have been presented as methods based on establishing processes that reduce energy consumption, using solvents and renewable materials, as well as ensuring a safe and high-quality fraction/product [22]. The aim of their application is to obtain natural products from industrial waste, which is considered a highly attractive initiative [23].

However, a more adequate term for such extraction and purification processes towards vanguard biorefineries could be sustainable separation, adding to the previous green definition, the notion of innovation across all sectors that allows for increased value in a wide sense, enhancing human and environment benefits and providing economically accessible technologies also advantageous to industry and large scale processing systems. It includes another dimension related to the generation of more creative and healthy jobs, contributing to the construction of a positive long-term sustainability agenda, encompassing bio-circular economy, environmental and social justice [24,25,26,27].

Sustainable separation can be defined as a holistic approach grounded on the circular and flexible design and application of renewable benign materials and auxiliaries (including bio-derived solvents, solid phases, membranes) and processes [rooted on green analytical techniques and sustainability metrics and indices, e.g., life cycle analysis (LCA), chemometrics, and other interdisciplinary indicators]. The aim is to optimize the tuneable use of energy, time, reagents, devices, scale, yield and number of steps to extract, fractionate, purify or even modify the components of interest from bio-derived waste during these in situ processes, ensuring analytical reproducibility, efficiency, selectivity robustness and scalability, with online evaluation regarding measurable objectives to create safer, healthier, and more efficient products, processes, and services under fair conditions, commercially available at accessible and just prices [28,29,30].

Natural products are among the most attractive value-added chemicals to be considered, which can be classified as organic compounds formed by living systems divided into three main categories: (1) compounds that occur in all cells and have a central role in their metabolism and reproduction (nucleic acids, amino acids, and sugars), also known as primary metabolites; (2) high-molecular polymeric materials which form cellular structures (cellulose, lignins, and proteins) and; (3) chemicals which are characteristic of a limited number of species, called secondary metabolites [22, 30]. Many of these bioactive compounds (e.g., alkaloids, terpenoids, and phenols) have been extensively used as medicine, nutraceuticals, flavors, fragrances, cosmetics, food additives, antimicrobials, bio-pesticides, etc. However, among the biggest challenges for biomass utilization is establishing benign methods to separate, purify and modify it into chemicals, fuels, and new materials. This is partially due to, with rare exceptions, the small amounts which are lower than 0.01% of the dry weight of vegetal, associated to possible product inhibition issues, large raw material variability, feed detoxification (when necessary), instability of the target compound (or fractions) and its presence in a complex mixture [23, 30].

It is well known that the separation steps, especially extraction, correspond up to 40–80% of the total costs of most common chemical processes currently used. From the point of view of a holistic biorefinery, separation has attracted more and more attention [31]. For instance, for natural products, solvent-based extraction is one of the best options nowadays considering the nature of many bio-based chemicals and matrices, and also the fact that other separation methods, such as those based on chromatography or membranes, do not have the same advantages taking into account commercial scales [32].

It is expected that high value-added components from biomass waste such as essential oils, polyphenols, and other food or medicinal-related products are extracted first, followed by polysaccharides, lignocelluloses or waxes via advanced separation and depolymerization processes. Among them, green solvents in general, supercritical CO2, subcritical water, microwave (MW)-assisted acidolysis and gas-expanded liquids have been mentioned [33]. Green solvents offer important separation advantages, including near-supercritical or supercritical fluids, which have outstanding mass transport properties, polarity, and easiness of solvent removal after extracting the compound of interest [34]. Another interesting solvent is water, but the range of compounds that are soluble in this medium is quite limited. Nevertheless, the use of subcritical water has been demonstrated to be advantageous for organic modification to depolymerize, hydrolyze, gasify, and carbonize biomass to produce bioactive compounds, sugars, biogas, and other valuable solids [16, 35].

Integrating two or more green techniques combining different strategies has played an important role in overcoming the main drawbacks of a single technique towards sustainable separation. For instance, for high-pressure solvent extraction in which the extractants do not reach supercritical conditions, the temperature, time, and solvent consumed can be dramatically reduced associating ultrasound-assisted treatment [28, 36]. In fact, more attention has been paid to green extraction, purification, or modification of natural products derived from agro-industrial waste nowadays, opening up new opportunities for sustainable approaches designed for bioeconomy and circular economy models. The aim of this paper is to present an overview of the design and application of green and sustainable separation of natural products for vanguard zero-waste biorefineries. The main analytical techniques and procedures described over the last 10 years will be described in detail, showing the potentialities, challenges, and perspectives in this topical and emergent scenario.

3 High Value-Added Approaches for Green and Sustainable Separation of Natural Products from Waste: What can be Observed from the Literature?

More recently, trends in green and sustainable extraction, fractionation and purification techniques have largely focused on minimizing the use of solvents, energy and materials that are intrinsically benign to human health and the environment [37]. In order to analyze the status quo and perspectives related to natural product separation from waste, a systematic literature review was conducted using the ISIS Web of Knowledge platform (reviews and papers) from 2006 to 2017, combining the descriptors “natural product” and “green extraction/separation” (or “sustainable extraction/separation” or “eco-friendly extraction/separation”) and “waste” (or “residue”). Figure 4 shows the number of publications during this period. There were more than 160 research papers and reviews that, to the best of our knowledge, are reasonably representative to show the strongest tendencies in this field over the last decade. It can be clearly observed that there has been an increase in the number of manuscripts over the last 10 years, covering the principles, advances, and applications of these green methods.

Fig. 4
figure 4

Number of publications per year focusing on green and sustainable separation (extraction, fractionation and purification) of natural products from waste (ISIS Web of Knowledge, January 2006 to December 2017)

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The obtained data reflect the growing interest and potential of green and sustainable methods to separate natural products from waste. One tendency observed in particular was the innovative ways to remove (integrating extraction, purification and/or modification in the same integrated system) and use such compounds in more contemporary sectors, promoting human and environmental health instead of general and old-fashioned remediation [19, 38]. As a result, new applications for food, nutraceutical, and agricultural sectors have been further explored, based on their advantageous properties as natural colorants, flavors, aromas, antioxidants, antifungals, bioformulations (bio-pesticides) or simply their use as precursors to generate other compounds for similar uses. Some details related to patents, (non-) clinical trials, sustainable indicators, scaling-up, regulatory, agro-industrial variability and availability, traceability, seasonality, good laboratory and manufacturing practices, additional economical and marketing issues have also been discussed.

Table 1 presents the research papers and reviews published during this period, highlighting their main focus, the green or sustainable techniques/approaches adopted, raw materials (mostly agro-industrial waste) and target compounds studied. The most common raw materials described as chemical feedstocks were waste derived from plants, for instance, food, mainly fruits (citrus, mango, papaya, grape, passiflora, banana, tomato, olive), grains (corn, soybean, sunflower, coffee) and other abundant materials (sugarcane bagasse, tea, wood bark, rice and wheat straw). Additional issues that affect the quality of the final products were also discussed, namely the procedure used for waste collection, selection, storage, drying, matrix characteristics (particle size, shape, specific surface area and porosity). The latter aspects play an important role in extraction efficiency due to the mass and heat transfer processes. Understanding the nature of raw material is crucial to avoid negative influences impacting the quality and yield during the removal of the target compounds, e.g., caused by co-extracted contaminants or due to the presence of some components in these matrices, such as water or high molecular weight compounds [39].

Table 1 Research papers and reviews focusing on green and sustainable separation of natural products from agro-industrial waste published from January 2006 to December 2017 (ISIS Web of Knowledge)
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The decision concerning the best method to separate the compounds of interest from the raw material is dependent on several aspects, such as the characteristics of the target extracts and raw material (physical–chemical properties), available technology, required purity, selectivity, stability and, more importantly here, the greenness of the whole process. As can be seen in Fig. 5, the most cited techniques in these research papers were based on solvent/maceration (25% of the total), microwave (19%), ultrasonication (14.7%) and supercritical fluid processing (13%), followed by methods using ionic liquids (7%), enzymatic and subcritical fluid treatment (6%), as well as the association of two or more techniques.

Fig. 5
figure 5

Main green and sustainable techniques used to separate natural products from waste described in research papers (ISIS Web of Knowledge, January 2006 to December 2017)

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According to the literature, the most widespread approaches for separating natural products from a number of matrices are based on liquid–liquid or solid–liquid extraction (LLE and SLE). Several greener alternatives have been proposed by replacing toxic or non-renewable organic solvents, as well as the extraction times. In some cases, solid-phase extractions (SPE) were also carried out and decreased both the amount of solvent and the number of extraction cycles, offering high enrichment factors [39, 40]. Actually, the mass transfer enhancement for SLE has been largely studied and applied, contributing to technology innovation, process intensification and integration, and energy saving, especially important for microwave, ultrasound, and high-pressure processing, for instance [41]. An overview of these techniques and related examples will be discussed in this section.

3.1 From Conventional Solvent Separation to Enhancement Processing Approaches Over the Last 10 Years

Solvent processing is one of the most traditional methods to remove natural products from bio-derived materials. In this extraction approach, the raw material in adequate size is exposed to different solvents, mostly organic, which remove soluble components of interest. The samples are then usually centrifuged and filtered to separate the solid residue, and the extract is used in this way (as a food supplement or for preparing functional foods, for example) or treated after this step. Solvent extraction is attractive compared to other methods due to low cost and simplicity. However, this method does not always use benign solvents; it frequently requires an evaporation/concentration step for recovery, it usually demands large amounts of solvent and needs a long time to be carried out. Additionally, the possibility of thermal degradation of natural bioactive components is also possible due to the high temperatures used during the extraction process [42]. Despite this, it is largely used in industries, where solvent reuse is of great economic importance. In general, the raw material (in its liquid or solid form) is mixed with a solvent, and the separation kinetic of the target compounds is influenced by parameters such as the solvent ratio, pH, and temperature and, for SLE, the particle size. The solvent should be atoxic, non-flammable and stable at working conditions, ideally renewable and cheap, with low viscosity and an adequate boiling point, allowing for easier solvent removal from the extract/fraction [43]. Recently, several models have been proposed to predict the best solvents to be used in a specific case, which do not only take into account physical descriptors, such as enthalpy of vaporization, dielectric constant, refractive index, boiling point, etc., but also empirical descriptors to evaluate, for instance, intermolecular forces (specific and non-specific solute–solvent interactions, e.g., hydrogen bond donor and/or hydrogen bond acceptor, Van der Waals and ion/dipole forces). Purely theoretical descriptors have been also introduced, offering the most important advantage of not requiring any experiments, as is the case of the model known as quantitative structure property relationship (QSPR), able to predict 127 polarity scales for more than 700 solvents [44].

The solvent selection also depends on the physical–chemical proprieties of the compounds of interest, considering principally the selectivity and greenness degree of the process, aiming at obtaining high recoveries and the integrity of the target compounds. In general, the raw material stays in contact with the solvent for a certain period (from minutes to days), when the soluble compounds are transferred from the matrix to the extractor phase, usually by shaking the system. For SLE, the dispersion of the particles in the solvent is facilitated agitating them, optimizing their contact and accelerating the separation process. Traditionally, solvent treatment is performed at room temperature, although heating can promote higher recoveries to these compounds that are not thermosensitive. In some cases, LLE and SLE can be time-consuming, demanding further purification and concentration steps, which are their main drawbacks [41, 45].

Maceration using green and non-toxic solvents for the separation of natural products from plant-derived waste has been described over the last years (e.g., to remove dyes from quince leaves or catechins, theaflavins, gallic acid, and antioxidants in general from walnut green husk, cranberry pomace, black tea and banana processing waste). According to these studies, using water, methanol, ethanol or a mixture of them at 70–100 °C can be a low-cost, benign alternative for the recovery of high added-value compounds derived from residual biomass [46,47,48,49]. Scaling-up was also studied, whose results showed to be useful in determining industrial process feasibility and the economic value of polyphenols for commercial use, increasing the overall profitability of the cranberry industry [48].

Whenever possible, higher temperatures allow for higher mass transfer in a shorter time with lower energy consumption in general, resulting in better recovery efficiency than conventional systems [50]. As observed in Fig. 5, the second most cited green and sustainable separation process is based on microwave heating and can be considered a non-conventional technique nowadays. Heating is based on non-ionizing electromagnetic waves. Those between 0.915 and 2.45 GHz are used for industrial, scientific and medical applications. The overall principle of heating is rooted in its direct impact with polar materials/solvents and is dependent on ionic conduction and dipole rotation, occurring simultaneously in most cases. The increased temperature can overcome the natural product-matrix interaction caused by Van der Waals forces, dipole attraction, hydrogen bonding of the compounds of interest and active sites in the matrix. Therefore, thermal energy can disrupt both solute–solute and solute–matrix interactions, providing the activation energy required for the desorption process. The mass transfer of the compounds from the raw material to the solvent is also accomplished by convection and diffusion mechanisms, causing the explosion of plant cells and releasing their content into the liquid phase [51].

The eco-friendly removal of essential oils, pectin and polyphenols from a number of plant raw materials mediated by microwave irradiation has been described over the last years, paying special attention to citrus waste [52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66]. In fact, the orange juice processing industry can be considered more than a good case study. This sector is highly wasteful, generating 50% of waste from the total fruit/starting material (e.g., peel, bagasse, seeds and yellow water). Around 20 million tonnes of orange peel per year are produced worldwide, which consist of water (80%) and sugars, cellulose, hemicellulose, pectin and d-limonene (20%). Recently, it was shown using a mathematical model that d-limonene extraction consisted of a two stage diffusion process for a microwave (MW) heating approach: initial extraction from the exterior of cells followed by trans-membrane diffusion. Compared to other conventional extraction methods, it was found that the microwave treatment was more efficient, resulting in a higher overall yield due to the access to a higher amount of d-limonene [59].

The successful microwave-assisted solvent-free modification of pectin derived from citrus waste has also been reported [53]. These approaches not only allow for the separation of the major components of citrus peel, but they also add further value through the production of other high value-added products, such as pectin, d-limonene and a rare form of mesoporous cellulose which are produced in a single step, without added acid [67]. Along these lines, the concept of dry-biorefinery is gaining momentum, since valuable products can be recovered from plant by-products without adding solvents or water, using green processes such as MW [56]. Innovation relies on the separation of the target compounds from raw materials, which are rich in water, achieved without adding solvents or water, illustrating a circular systemic process; i.e., all materials and resources could be reintegrated into the integrated and zero-waste biorefinery [19]. Although very attractive, as expected, the design and use of real MW industrial scale equipment requires additional studies related to safety, corrosion and maintenance intervals [68].

The combination of two or more extraction/concentration methods is quite common in the literature (Table 1). As described by Boukroufa et al. [56], the removal of essential oil, polyphenols and pectin from orange waste was conducted using microwave and ultrasound technology, without adding any solvents. Essential oil separation was performed by Microwave Hydrodiffusion and Gravity (MHG), and thereafter the remaining water of this process was used as a solvent for the subsequent extraction of flavonoids and pectin. For polyphenol separation, ultrasound-assisted extraction (UAE) was used, and response surface methodology (RSM) using the central composite design (CCD) approach was used to investigate the influence of some variables. The CCD revealed that the optimized conditions of ultrasound power and temperature were 0.956 W/cm2 and 59.83 °C giving a polyphenol yield of 50.02 mg GA/100 g dm, which, compared to conventional extraction, promoted an increase of 30% in the yield. Pectin was extracted by microwave-assisted extraction, resulting in a maximal yield of 24.2% for microwave power of 500 W (3 min), whereas traditional extraction provides18.32% (120 min). As can be seen, the combination of microwave, ultrasound and recycled water resulted in higher recoveries of the compounds of interest in a shorter time, so that a systemic loop/cycle could be closed using only the resources generated in the plant. This makes the whole process optimized in terms of time, energy savings, cleanliness and reduced amount of waste.

As can be noted, ultrasound has been widely utilized for helping to extract target components from waste plant-derived sources, reducing separation time, solvents, energy consumption and improving the product quality. The effectiveness of ultrasound is attributed to the cavitation phenomenon, assisting the solubilization of the compounds of interest into the solvent, enhancing their removal from the bulk raw material [69]. According to Chemat [70], the ultrasound waves (from 20 kHz to 10 MHz) pass through an elastic medium, inducing a longitudinal displacement of particles resulting in a succession of compression and rarefaction phases in this medium. Every medium has a critical molecular distance and, below this critical point, the liquid remains intact. However, above this distance, the liquid would break down, creating voids (cavitation bubbles) in the liquid. When the size of these bubbles reaches a critical point they collapse, releasing a large amount of energy. The estimated temperature and pressure at this time are estimated at 5000 and 2000 K atmospheres. This creates hotspots that accelerate the chemical reactivity into the medium, generating microjets directed towards the solid surface, also responsible for the general higher effectiveness of this technique, as the high pressure and temperature involved in the process destroy the cell walls of the plant matrices and their content can be released into the medium more easily.

Some new process aiming at agro-industrial waste application in food industries based on ultrasound-assisted extraction of natural products have been reported [71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79], as is the case of carotenoid separation from pomegranate peels using different vegetable oils as solvents [72]. Sunflower and soybean oils were used as solvents and parameters such as time, temperature, solid/oil ratio used were analyzed considering the yield. It was found that the optimum mild operating conditions were: extraction temperature, 51.5 °C; peel/solvent ratio, 0.10; amplitude level, 58.8%; solvent, sunflower oil. Additionally, a subsequent separation of oil and carotenoids was not necessary, since the pigmented oil can be used as a carotenoid source in different commercial products in this format.

The green recovery of cellulose from oil palm bunches by autoclave-based and ultrasonication pre-treatments were successfully developed to replace the non-green chlorite method [73]. An ultrasonic process with hydrogen peroxide yielded 49% cellulose with 9.13% alpha-cellulose content and 68.7% crystallinity, as compared to 64% cellulose with an autoclave treatment. The cellulose/polypropylene composites generated with high tensile strength, high thermal stability, and low water and diesel sorption showed great potentials for conversion into eco-composite products such as polymeric material insulated cables for high voltage engineering, automotive parts, sports tools and other household or office items.

Another highly cited green and sustainable technique to isolate organic compounds from bio-based waste is based on supercritical fluid processing (Fig. 5). It is widely known that substances at temperatures and pressures near or above their critical points have exceptional solvent characteristics for analytical purposes. These supercritical fluids possess liquid-like solvating and gas-like diffusivity power, and other tuneable properties that can be adjusted varying temperature, pressure and the addition of other components acting as a modifier. Due to its gas-like low viscosity and high diffusivity, the supercritical fluid can easily penetrate into plant materials with a fast mass transfer rate. Possibly, the most important property of supercritical fluids for separation processes is diffusion, obtaining solubility and diffusion good enough to provide quantitative extraction yield [80, 81]. Carbon dioxide (scCO2) is the fluid most widely used for extractions, with critical parameters of 31.1 °C and 73 atm (7.39 MPa), at relatively low operating conditions. It behaves as a nonpolar or polarizable solvent and low molar mass alcohols (co-solvents) are often added in small quantities to modify the solvent polarity. Because carbon dioxide can be depressurized to the gaseous state, the solvent is easily removed and supercritical fluid-based separation methods are easily coupled with subsequent analysis. Therefore, scCO2 provides miscibility to the majority of natural products, availability and low cost, reliably high purity, negligible toxicity, facility for removal and reuse, resulting in many advantages for downstream processing in terms of product purification and/or catalyst recycling [80].

The approach using scCO2 has been widely used for isolation and purification of chlorophylls, carotenoids, lipids, alkaloids, antioxidants from matrices such as filter tea, spruce bark, tomato and elderberry pomace, grape, passiflora, coffee and cupuassu seed waste [82,83,84,85,86,87,88,89,90,91,92,93,94,95,96,97,98,99]. In addition to the optimization of the separation process, some studies also aim to evaluate the techno-economic viability of large-scale commercial production, for example, to obtain cupuassu butter from cold-pressed seed residues, also evaluating the influence of thermodynamic and kinetic variables of yield, chemical composition and production costs of the extracts [86]. Optimal conditions related to extraction kinetics, chemical composition and production costs were 30–35 MPa and 50 °C. It was shown that the phenolic content (0.47–2.82 mg/g) was lower than those commonly found using other methods (20–23 mg/g). The high contents of tocopherols, as well as the unsaturated fatty acids (48%) compared to the saturated fatty acids (52%) present in the butter obtained by scCO2 demonstrated its great potential as an ingredient in food, pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries. In addition, process intensification for biodiesel production involving supercritical fluids has been reported [84, 90]. Such approaches can allow biodiesel production without any addition of catalyst, or via catalytic in situ or reactive extraction process, combining the extraction and reaction phase together in a single operation unit. These studies also discuss both processes towards the future bio-refinery setup and more efficient use of all waste produced.

The use of fluids different to CO2 has been described in the literature, but as they are usually organic solvents, they do not show any distinct advantages and often have high critical temperatures. Despite having a very high critical temperature, water shows unique properties in the subcritical region (200–300 °C), as a reduction in dielectric constant (20–30) and density (0.7–0.8 g/cm3) compared to water at room temperature, improving its ability to dissolve nonpolar organic and inorganic compounds. Under these conditions, the water dissociation constant into hydroxide and hydrogen ions are more than three orders of magnitude higher, so that near-critical water acts as a self-neutralizing acid or base catalyst, avoiding salt waste generation. Moreover, using subcritical and supercritical water conditions greatly simplifies the product purification step in some cases, since nonpolar products are insoluble in water in lower temperatures [80, 100,101,102,103,104,105,106].

Other potential scalable approaches have been described, such as enzymatic [107,108,109,110,111,112,113,114], alkaline [115,116,117,118,119,120] and based on different types of aqueous media (e.g., cyclodextrins, montmorillonite K-10/LiOH, green liquor) [121,122,123,124,125,126,127,128,129,130]; ionic liquids [131,132,133,134,135], deep eutectic solvents [136,137,138], constituting alternative methods for the recovery of high added-value compounds from agro-industrial waste aiming at obtaining the best analytical, economical and socio-environmental compromise [139,140,141,142].

Based on the investigated literature [143], Table 2 summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of the four most cited green and sustainable techniques.

Table 2 Advantages and disadvantages of different technologies that were most cited as green and sustainable techniques over the last 10 years
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4 Conclusions

The establishment of vanguard biorefineries for bioeconomy and circular economy urgently demands innovation in green and sustainable separation for the recovery of natural products from agro-industrial by-products all over the world. Sustainable separation includes the idea of integrated valorization not only in an economic sense, but also strengthens other social and environmental dimensions, from small to large producing scales. According to the literature over the last decade, the number of studies in this field has grown significantly in recent years. New approaches incorporating holistic extraction and/or purification techniques, also integrating systemic chemical transformation through the design and use of renewable materials and optimized processes should combine the best green analytical figures of merit with online evaluation of the whole production chain. These approaches should generate healthier and more efficient products, methods and processes at an affordable and fair cost.

Overall, solvent processing and its modification towards the enhancement of mass transfer to remove the compounds of interest from selected waste have been widely used (25%), also on industrial scales. Alternative extraction or purification methods have shown increasingly more applications, such as for microwave, ultrasonication and supercritical fluid processing. It was shown that a wide range of natural products and their derivatives are used mainly in food (as dyes, aromas, flavors) in medicines or green formulations in agriculture. According to the data available, one paradigmatic case largely studied is the valorization of citrus waste, representing more than 10% of all residues considered in the research papers.

Moreover, an emergent challenging topic is to evaluate biorefinery processing alternatives, i.e., sustainability assessment tools, for example LCA, which include parameters such as feedstock supply (to verify the suitability and adequacy of a potential biomass feedstock for the separation or transformation treatment), process performance (to assess the input–output balance of material and energy flows) and bio-based chemical production [144]. Therefore, the decision about the best separation approach takes into account various fundamental aspects and is based on green and sustainable assessment tools, considering the type of agro-industrial waste (e.g., quantity, periodicity, chemical variability, water amount, distance to the processing unit), the natural target products (chemical quality, purity, humidity, costs etc.) and available technologies.

Using sustainability indicators and tools will be increasingly demanded in this field, contributing to the greenness or sustainability of the whole processing system. The development of a sustainable separation method which provides better recovery efficiency will not only add value to the agro-industrial waste, reducing the overall manufacturing costs and the use of synthetic chemicals, but will also aggregate value to the whole production chain, including its final products. The emergence of bio-based industries is changing the current status of the producing systems, contributing to the current biomass residual losses. Based on the literature, the scenario for future research and innovation in green and sustainable separation for the recovery of agro-industrial waste is truly beginning, bringing together various areas and sectors towards more efficient and circular systems.