In April 2008 , U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich picked up a sandwich wrap in the Capitol Hill cafeteria and sit down to lunch . Kucinich ’s repast soon take an unappetizing turn , however , after he chomped down on an olive pit hiding in his meal and split his tooth open .
Things went downhill from there . Kucinich ’s tooth became infected and required all-encompassing dental work , propel the Ohio congressman to file a $ 150,000 lawsuit against the companies he sense were responsible for letting the offending Olea europaea pit slip into his wrap . He finally settle for an undisclosed amount .
So olive pits surely do n’t make much of a meal , but could they have other utilisation ? After all , the world produce an astonishing amount of olive – 21.2 million gobs , or 19.3 million metric tons , say the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations . It would be a bummer for all those Inferno to just sit in alandfill .
Fortunately , people are constantly finding new and exciting USA for olive pits once take trash . For case , an enterprising doctorial pupil from the University of Granada prove that olive pits and other wastefulness collected from the yield ’s product can be used to excrete toxic heavy metals from industrial waste product . Another subject area from the University of Sciences and Technology Houari Boumediene showed that the pits could facilitate denitrification , a cognitive process ofttimes used as part of wastewater intervention . And perhaps most importantly , olive pits might link nutrient like corn and sugar cane as arenewable energy source .
food for thought - based fuel is already an crucial part of the world ’s energy supplying . In the United States in 2007 , for instance , one - third of the land ’s 92.9 million acres ( 375,952 square kilometers ) of maize survive to ethyl alcohol production , accord to a 2011 article in the daybook Nature . Brazil has become vim main in orotund part because of the country ’s power to use sugar cane for car fuel . These craw have a problem though : When they attend as fuel , they ca n’t process as food , too . Fortunately , scientists are explicate biofuels made of inedible plant character , and as congressman Kucinich would gibe , European olive tree pit are for certain inedible . But can they be used as biofuel ? If you ’re burning to know , read on .
Olive Power: Energy of the Future?
We know olive pits are more than just trash , but it might storm you to know that they can generate vim in multiple ways . The first method wo n’t shock anyone who keeps a voltaic pile of seasoned wood quick for the fireplace : burning . Olive pits do n’t just burn ; they burn well . In fact , pound for pound , European olive tree pits get more vigor through combustion than hardwood , fit in to the not - for - lucre engineering organization ASME .
Sure , you could probably just toss your European olive tree pits in a howl flame to generate a petty hotness , but the smarter way to cauterize them is in a kitchen range project for the purpose . Magnum ’s Countryside stove , for representative , can handle Olea europaea pits and much any other type of biomass ( shelled corn , cherry red quarry or wood shot , to name a few ) that you’re able to throw at it . But do n’t think olive pits can only be burned on a small exfoliation . Large European olive tree processing companies are warming up to the theme as well .
Musco Family Olive Co. , for example , generates about half of the electrical energy needed for the company ’s olive processing works to run just by burning the olive pits that it once yield to transport to the landfill . And since the troupe is the United States ' large Olea europaea mainframe , that ’s a lot of European olive tree pits : 13 billion , to be exact . The electric potential to turn olive pits into electricity is even high in Spain , the world ’s prominent manufacturer of olive . Already , a company named Calordom is using burning to power hundreds of buildings throughout Madrid , and although some people have concern about pollution generated from the process , the effectiveness of burning olive pits for energy is hard to debate . But thanks to the chemic writing of olive pits , burning is n’t the only way to coax fuel out of an European olive tree endocarp .
When researcher from the previously note University of Sciences and Technology Houari Boumediene break European olive tree pits into their ingredient for their denitrification study , they found that the pits are mostly made of cellulose and hemicelluloses ( less complex polysaccharides found in plants ) , while about 15 to 23 percentage of olive pits are frame of lignin ( a polymer that ’s related to cellulose ) . That composition happens to be the same composition of what are roll in the hay as cellulosic biomass , things like sawdust , Zea mays stubble and paper products . Cellulosic biomass is tough to turn into ethanol than sugar cane or corn since the kale are cunning to distil , but researcher are finding a agency .
A team from Universities of Granada and Jaen discovered that by putting olive pits into a insistence cooker along with certain enzymes , they were able to remove kale from the pits . From there , the team fermented the gelt to produce about 12.6 Egyptian pound ( 5.7 kilograms ) ofethanolfor every 220 pound ( 100 kilograms ) of Olea europaea quarry they put in . Who know how much more efficient the outgrowth could get ? So while olive pit may not single - handedly solve the world ’s vigour woes , they could pitch in , proving the saying " one military man ’s chicken feed is another humankind ’s biofuel " right once again .
