PRODUCTION OF GREASE FROM RUBBER SEED

CHAPTER ONE

• INTRODUCTION

1.1 BACKGROUND OF STUDY

The processing of fruits results in high amounts of waste materials such as peels, seeds, stones, and oil seed meals. A disposal of these materials usually represents a problem that is further aggravated by legal restrictions. Thus, new aspects concerning the use of these wastes as by-products for further exploitation on the production of food additives or supplements with high nutritional value have gained increasing interest. It is well known that by-products represent an important source of sugars, minerals, organic acid, dietary fibre and phenolics which have a wide range of action which includes anti-tumoral, antiviral, antibacterial, cardio-protective and anti-mutagenic activities. ^[1]

Rubber scientifically known as Hevea brasiliensis was initially cultivated at Amazon Rainforest but now mostly the plantation of rubber is in South and Southeast Asia. Malaysia has an estimated average of 1,229,940 hectares of rubber plantation in 2007 according to the report of Malaysian Rubber Board on 2009. There are ongoing researches developed to dismantle this major asset of Malaysia for its maximum utility as it is known to be very beneficial and profitable crop. In addition, rubber tree is also being applied in many industries such as furniture, manufacturing. The most important use of rubber tree is the production of latex which had been modified and improved for many years to be used widely in industry. As reported by several researches ^[1-3], rubber seed oil had shown its potential in oleo chemical applications in paints, surface coatings, soap, alternative to diesel 4and vulcanized vegetable oil production. ^[2] Rubber seed oil contains about40-50% of oil 1. ^[4-6] Its high content of fats and protein can be consumed in human food and animal feed as well as in production of soap, cosmetics and biofuel. ^[3] Furthermore,the rubber seed has been fermented and is used in curriesand condiments in Jerantut, Pahang in Malaysia ^[7].Therefore, rubber seed had been found to have plenty of industrial potentials.

The extraction technique used to obtain high aggregate value compounds from natural products is crucial for product quality. Soxhlet extraction is a standard technique. The advantage of conventional soxhlet is the sample is repeatedly brought into contact with the fresh portions of the solvent, thereby helping to displace the transfer equilibrium. There is a wide variety of official methods involving a sample preparation step based on soxhlet extraction. Soxhlet extraction is a general, well-established technique which clearly surpasses in performance other conventional extraction techniques. However, there are only few studies on the extraction of mango kernel oil and the fatty acid profile. Therefore, the objectives of this study were to compare the efficiency of the extraction solvents; evaluate the quality of mango kernel oil through the physicochemical properties, fatty acid composition and total phenolic compound that can be used in the extraction of mango kernel oil with soxhlet.

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