Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy https://doi.org/10.1007/s10098-018-1523-5 ORIGINAL PAPER Green technology of liquid biphasic fotation for enzyme recovery utilizing recycling surfactant and sorbitol Revathy Sankaran 1  · Pau Loke Show 1  · Yee Jiun Yap 2  · Yang Tao 3  · Tau Chuan Ling 4  · Katsuda Tomohisa 5 Received: 18 December 2017 / Accepted: 22 March 2018 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Liquid biphasic fotation (LBF) system has been recognized as an efcient, green, economically sustainable and biocompat- ible technique for biomolecules separation and purifcation. The main drawbacks of the conventional process of biomolecules separation are expensive production cost, utilization of phase components that are inefciently recycled and global pollution due to high chemical consumption and wastage. In this paper, a novel approach of LBF system for lipase recovery utilizing recycling phase components comprising surfactant and xylitol was investigated. The scope of this study focuses on pollution prevention as well as clean and environmentally friendly process for enzyme extraction via LBF. The green process proposed in this study uses phase-forming components that have recovery and recycling abilities for minimal use of chemicals for enzyme extraction. This novel method utilized Triton X-100 and xylitol for lipase extraction from Burkholderia cepacia. A few parameters were optimized to obtain high lipase separation efciency and yield. Based on the ideal conditions of LBF, the average lipase separation efciency and yield are 86.46 and 87.49%, correspondingly. Phase components recycling were proposed in order to reduce the chemicals consumption in LBF system. Upscaling of the recycling study exhibited consistent result with the laboratory scale. It was found that 97.20 and 98.67% of Triton X-100 and xylitol were recovered after fve times of recycling and that a total of 75.87% of lipase separation efciency was obtained. Recovery and recycling of phase components in the extraction process are established as the principal green chemistry method, which yields high separation efciency and is economically feasible on an industrial scale. Keywords Liquid biphasic fotation · Green · Recycling phase components · Surfactant · Xylitol Introduction Traditional purifcation methods such as monoliths, column chromatography, crystallization, diafltration, membrane separation and precipitation are generally time-consuming, involves batch operation, requires multi-step operations and generates low concentration of products, and the products are often combined in complex mixtures of impurities (Nfor et al. 2008). Due to these limitations, industries today are looking for an alternative purifcation method that is sim- ple and inexpensive and generates a high yield of products with low environmental impacts (Gupta et al. 2004). Liq- uid biphasic fotation (LBF) is comparatively an innova- tive extraction and purifcation technique that fuses solvent sublation (SS) with aqueous two-phase system (ATPS) (Sankaran et al. 2018). This novel method is introduced as an alternative to conventional liquid–liquid extraction (Bi et al. 2009). * Pau Loke Show PauLoke.Show@nottingham.edu.my 1 Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, Jalan Broga, 43500 Semenyih, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia 2 Department of Applied Mathematics, Faculty of Engineering, University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, Jalan Broga, 43500 Semenyih, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia 3 College of Food Science and Technology, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China 4 Faculty of Science, Institute of Biological Sciences, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 5 Department of Chemical Science and Engineering, Kobe University, Kobe 657-8501, Japan