Estudio de la formación de trihalometranos en las fases de elaboración de transformados vegetales y en procesos auxiliares de la industria alimentaria

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Water is the most important resource of our planet. Just 0.02% is fresh water, what in addition needs to be extracted and purified for consumption. The scarcity of water in Europe is not particularly severe, not so in Spain and more specifically in the Region of Murcia where droughts are becoming more frequent. The industry consumes a very important part of this resource, where the food industry spends approximately 11% of it. Processed vegetables industries use water on most of its stages of manufacturing and auxiliaries, which results in waste water with high organic load, which is necessary to purify before discharging. Approximately 75% of the water consumed in industry is transformed into waste water, compared with 25% that again joins the product or evaporates. Waters used in the canning industry are reused mainly for auxiliary processes, which implies a disinfection of them. Nowadays, the most widely used method for the disinfection of water is the chlorination, due to the fact that it is not only effective, but also it is persistent and maintains the water protected during all the transportation to the point of consumption. Meanwhile, as we have said before, waste water coming from the canning industry contains a high amount of organic matter, which reacts with chlorine giving rise to disinfection by-products such as trihalomethanes. Trihalomethanes are considered to be carcinogenic compounds whose main source of exposure is ingestion, although his volatile nature makes that we should consider other sources such as inhalation and the dermal route. Based on the above, we considered a work to go further into the issue of the exposure to trihalomethanes in the canning industry, so we proceeded to the validation of the analytical method, designing a gas mass chromatography method, quantification was carried out with an of Gases - masses HP-6890 gas chromatograph, fitted with the RTL system, with a multi-positional injection (Gerstel Multi Purpose Sampler-MPS) system and equipped with head space. From the results obtained we can state that the method that we will use for the determination of trihalomethanes in waste water is linear, accurate and precise in the range of established work. According to the stages of manufacture more common in this type of industries, we analyze the waters from the network and wells, coming to the conclusion that these waters in general are free of THMs. The positive results are found in well water chlorinated by the companies themselves. We, then, sampled waters coming from each of the phases of the industrial processing, where in addition to measuring the trihalomethanes, we controlled the levels of residual chlorine and total organic carbon (trihalomethanes precursors ). The results obtained lead us to say that in general, the stages of manufacture of canned vegetables show THMs values that are below the limit established by RD 140/2003, what does not happen with sampled auxiliary stages: purification and cooling after sterilization with cooling towers. After the data obtained we proceeded to focus on these stages, where after a more detailed study we conclude that the values of positive THMs found in the stage of purification (treatment plant output) are due to additional chlorination treatments that certain undertakings were doing for irrigation use. Cooling towers are auxiliary equipment that chills water from sterilization processes to be able to use it again, which implies a chlorination of the same. The type of cooling tower is a factor to consider in the occurrence of THMs, since we find them in those designs where the water has been in contact with the sterilised containers, containing organic matter, not in those designs that carry heat exchangers partners and therefore there is no contact between chlorine and organic matter. At the same time, this work shows that high values of THMs are produced by a poor maintenance of the towers. In general, we can state after this work, that the values of THMs found in the study are low, so there is not a high risk of exposure for this type of industries, but we also have to note that there are alternative treatments to reduce the exposure ranging from the removal of organic matter by filtration treatments to the use of other types of disinfection or a combination of both.