Abstract:
The people of the Sahara exploit the by-products of the date palm, such as the trunk, leaves, pits and so on. Date pits, which result from various date processing operations, are often discarded or used as an ingredient in animal feed. It is considered a valuable by-product that can be used to produce a variety of value-added products. In our study, we looked for a way to add value to date pits by transforming them into oil, which has some interesting characteristics. To do this, we extracted the oil from powdered date pits of two varieties, which were bought from the market of downtown and el Guerrara respectively in the wilaya of Ghardaïa (Degla Beida and Tafzouine) by soxhlet using petroleum ether. We then carried out a number of analyses to study the physico-chemical characteristics of the oil, as well as the colorimetric determination of carotenoids, chlorophylls,total tocopherols and sterols. The oil yield obtained was higher for the Degla Beida variety (7.396%) and lower for the Tafzouine variety (5.265%). The physico-chemical characterisation showed that these varieties had similar values for refractive index, density and acid number (DB: 1.306 ±0.16, TAF: 1.66±0.004), iodine (DB:
84.95±1.33, TAF: 85.32±3.74), peroxyde (DB: 2.66±0.11, TAF :2.20±0.20), and saponification number (DB: 231.94±3.54, TAF: 226.35±4.35). On the other hand, the two oils differed remarkably in carotenoid, chlorophyll, total tocopherols (DB: 0.73±0.01, TAF: 0.55±0.05) and total sterols (DB: 7.53±3.02, TAF: 6.44±0.35) content, depending on a number of factors (cultivar, environmental conditions, etc.).
This extracted oil can be used in various sectors because of its richness and the importance of its biochemical composition, such as food industry, cosmetics and pharmaceutical products for their added value.
