Resource-oriented Eco-efficiency and Sustainable Pathways in Olive Oil Waste Management: a Comprehensive Literature Review

Abstract

Among the various agri-food supply chains, olive oil production draws particular attention due to its economic and cultural significance and the ever-growing global production. This growth has led to a corresponding rise in the olive oil waste and by-products production, which pose significant environmental challenges due to their high phytotoxic organic content. At the same time, these by-products also contain valuable compounds with potential applications across multiple industrial sectors. Much of the existing literature focuses on identifying efficient technologies to reduce the toxicity of these wastes and by-products and to allow their valorisation. This study deploys a dual-query systematic review guided by the PRISMA protocol, analysing a final corpus of 304 articles to examine sustainable management strategies under a combined circular economy (CE) and environmental sustainability (ES) perspective. Query 1 (239 articles) maps technical treatment and valorisation pathways, while Query 2 (65 articles) evaluates resource-oriented eco-efficiency within the literature. The results point out a range of treatment methods, including anaerobic digestion, composting, membrane filtration, and thermal processes, highlighting how specific process configurations considering recovered resource value and localized environmental burdens. Furthermore, resource oriented eco-efficiency within the sample was evaluated through theoretical and integrated frameworks, with Life Cycle Assessment emerging as the absolute dominant quantitative methodology utilized to assess environmental performance. The main theoretical contribution of this work is the operationalization of a unified, resource-oriented eco-efficiency framework that addresses the current lack of standardized methods, delivering a policy-aligned roadmap to support advanced decision-making in the olive oil sector.