Industrial Crops and Products 33 (2011) 224–228 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Industrial Crops and Products journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/indcrop Selection of cultivars for minimization of waste and of water consumption in cassava starch production Helayne Aparecida Maieves, Daiana Cardoso De Oliveira, Júlia Rodrigues Frescura, Edna Regina Amante ∗ Food Science and Technology Department, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Rod. Admar Gonzaga, 1346, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, CEP 88034001, Brazil article info Article history: Received 28 July 2010 Received in revised form 13 October 2010 Accepted 15 October 2010 Keywords: Cassava Cultivars Starch Waste minimization Water minimization abstract When considering the sustainability of a business, deciding on the industrial use of starchy raw materials requires more than just the information on their agricultural productivity and starch yield. The main goal of this work was to investigate ten different cultivars to select for industrial applications seeking to minimize residue generation and water consumption in the production of cassava starch. The cassava cultivars that are richer in starch (22.61–22.89 g 100 g -1 ) generated the smallest amounts of residues (420.63–423.52 kg ton -1 of cassava roots) and required the smallest amounts of water for processing. There is an inverse relationship between the dry matter content in cassava roots and the amount of solid residues generated. One of the cultivars stood out for showing the following features: high starch yield, little tendency for generation of residues, low requirement of water for processing, easiness in the peeling process, and high content of total solids; therefore such features can suggest its use for starch extraction with wastes minimization. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Cassava is one of the main industrial sources of starch in tropi- cal climate countries. The cassava plant is original to the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest and has been adapted to the African and Asian continents, who today are the main producers of this raw mate- rial. Besides being consumed in different culinary preparations, it is prominent for starch extraction due to the simplicity of the pro- cess used since its starch granules have a small relationship with proteins, lipids, and other components of vegetable tissue which demand more elaborate industrial processes to purify the granules. Although cassava roots show significantly lower amounts of starch in comparison to corn, the extraction conditions compensate such difference (Marcon et al., 2007). There is constant search for cassava cultivars with high con- tent of starch and high agricultural productivity, where starch yield is one of the roots’ most important features. However, nowadays environmental aspects are being considered because the extraction process is performed in an aqueous medium, where consumption of water can reach from 6000 to 10,000 L ton -1 of roots (Sriroth et al., 2000b). Moreover, when cassava roots are processed for starch extraction, fibrous solid residues are generated, corresponding to 10–15% of the cassava root (Sriroth et al., 2000a; Avancini, 2006). ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +55 48 32346033; fax: +55 48 37219943. E-mail address: eamante@cca.ufsc.br (E.R. Amante). Although these solid residues have been thoroughly investigated, they still have little industrial application because of their high retention of water, which is typical of these starchy and fibrous roots (Amante et al., 1999a; Amante et al., 1999b; Sriroth et al., 2000a). In the cassava starch extraction process, each ton of cassava root produces at least another ton of bagasse (85% of moisture) and around 10 million litres of wastewater with 1% of solids (Pandey et al., 2000). Cassava roots accumulate starch as their main dry matter com- ponent; therefore, there is a presumable correlation between dry mass and starch content. The search for roots with higher starch content is interesting for companies, who acquire their raw mate- rials based on their industrial yield, and also for producers, who are remunerated according to the quality of their product (Cereda and Vilpoux, 2003). Starch content is the amount of starch present in cassava roots and industries measure it through determination of the specific weight of the roots (hydrostatic balance) (Cereda et al., 2003; Cereda and Vilpoux, 2003). Considering the current search for environmental sustainability of industrial activities, and within the concepts of cleaner tech- nologies, it is necessary to analyze processes that involve a better selection of raw materials with higher starch yield associated with a lower consumption of water and energy and also with lower gen- eration of residues. The characterization of cultivars establishes a starting point when deciding on what cultivars are more specifically suitable for different industrial applications. In this characteriza- tion, the relationship between the components related to residue 0926-6690/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.indcrop.2010.10.017