PRODUKSI MINYAK ATSIRI DARI LIMBAH KULIT JERUK PONTIANAK DENGAN CARA ’’ COLD PRESS’’

Abstract

District of Tebas, in the sub province of sambas (West Kalimantan Province) is a major producer of special variety of orange fruit, which is locally known as jeruk Siam (Pontianak Orange).  The fruits can be harvested throughout the year and are not significantly affected by seasonal changes. At this moment, the orange peel creates a serious environmental problem as it is just dumped as garbage, whose smell eventually becomes very disturbing in the neighborhood. On the other hand, actually this orange peels are potential as source of orange essential oil (usually consist of l- limonen,ß- mirsen,ß-pinen and α-pinen), which is expensive ingredient to be used in fine chemical industries, such as pharmaceutical, food and cosmetic industries. One of the methods to recover this valuable essential oil is cold press. The reason of choosing this method among other possible ones is mainly because of its simplicity so that it is potentially adopted by small/medium scale industries in West Kalimantan. The study presented in this paper is then focused on the process parameters which significantly affect the recovery of orange essential oils from orange peel by cold press method. The research was intended to study the effect of orange peel size and pressure applied on some extends of essential oil recovery. The obtained oil was then analyzed to investigate its major chemical substituent.

The results indicated that variation of the size of orange peel slices significantly influenced the oil recovery. Orange peel which was cut too small promoted unintentionally losses of essential oil before the pressing process. On the contrary, the size which is too big created additional obstacle for oil diffusion so that it was more difficult to squeeze the oil out of the orange peel, even at higher pressure. The optimum size was found to be arround 3-4 mm. The pressure applied also affected the oil recovery, but the effect was statistically not as significant as the effect of the size of orange peel slices.