EXTRACTION OF R-(+)-LIMONENE FROM ORANGE PEELS: ASSESSEMENT AND OTIMIZATION OF THE GREENNESS OF TRADITIONAL EXTRACTION PROCESSES

This article reports a study, performed in educational context, to increase the greenness of the extraction of R-(+)-limonene from orange peels. Protocols from the literature were evaluated with the green star (GS)metric and new protocols, based in them, were designed to increase the overall greenness. These were tested in the laboratory and their greenness was assessed by traditional greenness metrics and metrics inspired in the industrial activity. Results showed that the steam distillation technique presents the largest overall greenness when evaluated by the GS, because organic solvents are not involved, but mass and energy metrics indicate that the extractions by solvent techniques are greener. This conflict denotes the complexity of the concept of chemical greenness and the need of using several types of metrics when greenness evaluation is at stake. The results show that the inclusion of experiments on the R-(+)-limonene extraction in the educational laboratory is efficient to show the difficulties of assessing the greenness of chemistry and of implementing Green Chemistry.