At present there is an enormous interest in providing new answers to one of the main societal challenges: sustainability. Sustainability can be understood as a rational way of improving processes to maximize production while minimizing the environmental impact. Many aspects can be considered in this framework, ranging from the rational use of resources to the modern concept of biorefinery involving biomass conversion processes and equipment to produce fuel, power, and added-value chemicals from organic material. Considering this framework, the extraction of high added-value products from natural sources is of high interest since it can allow consolidating the idea of sustainable processes. Nevertheless, for the development of these sustainable processes the 12 principles of Green Chemistry have to be closely examined, considering that effectively provide a framework for designing and/or improving materials, products, processes and systems from an environment protection perspective. New challenges researchers are facing are the development of fast, selective, efficient, sustainable, green (without using toxic organic solvents) processes, providing also with high yields and at lower costs. Processes able to meet these requirements are, among others, those based on the use of compressed fluids such as supercritical fluid extraction (SFE), pressurized liquid extraction (PLE) and subcritical water extraction (SWE). In the present talk, different examples will be presented for the production of bioactives based on the use of different processes and compressed fluids to achieve sustainable processes. Among other examples, some research works developed in our laboratory will be presented dealing with the extraction and supercritical antisolvent fractionation of antioxidants from plants, and the development of new strategies of integrated green processes for obtaining antioxidants-enriched extracts from algae, all of them with proved antiproliferative activity against colon cancer cells.

Finantial support: - Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (now Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness)- (Project AGL2011-29857-C03-01). - EU 613588- MIRACLES, “Multi-product Integrated bioRefinery of Algae: from Carbon dioxide and Light Energy to high-value Specialties“.

Trabajo presentado al V Congreso Iberoamericano de Productos Naturales: "Biodiversidad: Caminos y Horizontes", celebrado en Bogotá (Colombia) del 25 al 29 de abril de 2016.

Peer Reviewed