Green extraction and characterization of leaves phenolic compounds: a comprehensive review

Abstract

Although containing significant levels of phenolic compounds (PCs), leaves biomass coming from either forest, agriculture, or the processing industry are considered as waste, which upon disposal, brings in environmental issues. As the demand for PCs in functional food, pharmaceutical, nutraceutical and cosmetic sector is escalating day by day, recovering PCs from leaves biomass would solve both the waste disposal problem while ensuring a valuable “societal health” ingredient thus highly contributing to a sustainable food chain from both economic and environmental perspectives. In our search for environmentally benign, efficient, and cost-cutting techniques for the extraction of PCs, green extraction (GE) is presenting itself as the best option in modern industrial processing. This current review aims to highlight the recent progress, constraints, legislative framework, and future directions in GE and characterization of PCs from leaves, concentrating particularly on five plant species (tea, moringa, stevia, sea buckthorn, and pistacia) based on the screened journals that precisely showed improvements in extraction efficiency along with maintaining extract quality. This overview will serve researchers and relevant industries engaged in the development of suitable techniques for the extraction of PCs with increasing yield.

Keywords:

• Alternative solvent assisted extraction
• pressure assisted extraction
• ultrasound assisted extraction
• electrically assisted extraction
• electromagnetically assisted extraction

Acknowledgments

The first author would like to acknowledge IDB Scholarship, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for supporting her PhD study.

CRediT roles

Nushrat Yeasmen: Conceptualization; Formal analysis; Writing – original draft. Dr. Valérie Orsat: Writing – review and editing.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no potential competing interest.

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.