I second Dave's comments. Anytime we can take a waste product like this and convert it to a useful and economic product - we get one step closer to sustainable living. Our planet will thank us in the long run for efforts like these. Thanks for the article, Ann. It was a bright spot in my day.
Thanks for the article. It would be a great cycle to see the bio-plastic from avocado pits made into biodegradable take out containers! With such a high volume of raw material, the price may be reasonable.
I forget that many parts of the country still use Styrofoam until I leave the Bay Area.
Dave, glad you enjoyed the article. I adore avocados and would eat them everyday if they were in season locally in Northern California. That's one reason I was attracted to this story. Using Google Translate was a pain, but I'm good at figuring out bad translations into English, plus I absorbed a lot of Spanish when living in LA and hanging with my brother's in-laws from Mexico. I'm also familiar with Tec de Monterrey, so was not surprised that this innovation began there as a student project.
Ann, thanks for posting this. Also, thanks for linking to a Spanish-language website. It's an unfortunate fact that English speakers often ignore anything in other languages -- as though anything important must necessarily be in English.
Tec de Monterrey is very well known for integrating engineering and business, so it's perhaps not surprising that this company was founded by Tec students.
By the way, the cheerful "¡Aguacates de México!" jingle -- which is familiar to anyone who listens to Spanish-language radio in the U.S. -- is now stuck in my head after reading this article.
@TJ McDermott: Mexico produces about 1.3 million metric tons of avocados per year, so 30,000 metric tons per month of seeds (360,000 metric tons per year) being disposed of by industry seems reasonable.
Avocados are either sold whole (in which case the industry isn't responsible for disposing of the seeds), or else processed into other products (guacamole, avocado oil, etc.).
I'm going to guestimate that about 75% of the weight of an avocado is contained in the seed. That would mean that 1.3 million metric tons of avocados (i.e. the entire annual crop) yields 975,000 metric tons of seeds.
If industry has to dispose of 360,000 metric tons of seeds per year, that means that about 40% of the avocados are processed, and 60% are being sold as primary product (whole avocados). That makes sense to me.
1.3 million metric tons is about 4.3 billion avocados -- which sounds like a lot -- but if we assume that all Mexican avocados are consumed either in the U.S. or Mexico (combined population about 430 million), that's only 10 avocados per person per year (or 6, if you only don't count processed avocados).
Each member of my family eats at least one avocado per week, so we're definitely exceeding our quota.
TJ, the answer is kind of yes and no, depending on what part of the process you mean. It's the front end where things are really different, depending on what the feedstock is and whether it's starch-based or cellulose-based (or yet others). Once you've figured out how to convert it into ethanol you're home free. But that conversion is different for different feedstocks, depending on, among other things, the monomer, which is why Biofase wants to find other feedstock candidates with the same monomer so they can use their process on it. And the conversion can contain multiple steps--or not. There are lots of research efforts afoot to simplify that front-end process. If there's a holy grail, it might be there.
UK-based Plastic Logic and French company ISORG have created what the pair tout as a first in flexible printed electronics: a large area, conformable, organic image sensor printed on plastic.
For 3D printing to make the jump from rapid prototyping to manufacturing, engineers will need to find easier ways to move products from their CAD screens to their printers.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
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For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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