Examining the bentonite produced in a biodiesel refinery process as soil amendment in a well-draining soil
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Examining the bentonite produced in a biodiesel refinery process as soil amendment in a well‑draining soil Francesca Ugolini1 · Vasileia Kamalaki1 · Carlos Garcia Izquierdo2 · Francesco Primo Vaccari1 · Costanza Calzolari1 · Fabrizio Ungaro1 Received: 27 May 2020 / Accepted: 12 August 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The expansion of biofuels produced from cooking oils and vegetal oils is expected to increase, together with the production of exhausted clay used in the refinery process. Clay produced in the process is considered waste as it is not intended for further applications. This study has assessed a sample of clay produced by a vegetal oil refinery plant and tested it for environmental applications with two types of vegetal species. In the experiment, the oily clay was added to a sandy loam soil in different percentages in order to modify the soil texture and assess the effect on the hydrological and chemical properties. The results demonstrated that on the one hand, oily clay does not change the pH in the soil mixture and it enriches the elemental composition (in terms of Mg, Cu and Zn), but, on the other hand, there are counteracting effects. Even if oily clay did not have toxic effects on seed germination, when applied to the soil, the presence of Ni did affect the plants’ growth. The results thus suggest the need for phytoremediation prior to any application of such clay in soil. Graphic abstract
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Keywords Oil refinery waste · Bentonite · Fatty acids · Ni and Cr toxicity · Beta vulgaris · Phaseolus vulgaris
Introduction The European Biomass Industry Association defines used cooking oil (UCO) as oils and fats that have been used at large and small scale for cooking or frying, for instance in the food processing industry, restaurants, fast foods and in households. In Europe, the amount of UCO generated in each country varies depending on the use of vegetable oil, and by one estimate amounts to ∼700,000–1,000,000 tons/ year (Kulkarni and Dalay 2006a)—with 90% deriving from vegetal oils with the exception of a few countries such as Belgium, where relatively large quantities of animal fats are used (Peters et al. 2013). Another estimate (Tsoutsos and Stavroula 2013) places the potential amount of collected UCO at around 8 L/capita/year, increasing by ∼2%/year due to the annual increase in cooking oil usage in the EU-15. The European Waste Catalogue classifies UCO as municipal waste; thus, in general, the infrastructure for its collection needs to increase the effectiveness of disposal or recycling (Anderssen et al. 2007). Although initially the UCOs have been valorized as animal feed products, after the dioxin scandal occurred in Belgium in 1999, EC Regulation no. 1774/2002 was introduced to ban UCO from animal feeds with the exception of only a certain category of animal traceable fats (Kazmi and Shuttleworth 2013). Moreover, there
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