Elimination of micronutrients from winery wastewater using entrapped grape marc in alginate beads

Nowadays, there exists a major concern about the requirement of decreasing the environmental impact of industrial activities. In general, the food industry produces high amount of effluents that must be treated. There are two ways of focusing on the treatment of effluents and residues from food industry. One interesting strategy consists of the revalorization of residues in order to obtain valuable products, and the other approach is the treatment of these effluents using eco-friendly technologies. In this work, a residue of winery industry consisting of grape marc was entrapped in calcium alginate beads in order to obtain a valuable product that could be used as an adsorbent to remove micronutrients from winery effluents in order to avoid eutrophication. Biodegraded grape marc entrapped in calcium alginate beads was able to remove most of the total nitrogen, NH 4 , and NO 3 present in the water and around 60% of Mg, P, K, and total carbon.