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Udaiveer Singh has been running a baby coconut stand in Nangal, a city in Punjab, for six years. He buys 1,200 pieces of coconut every six days from an agent in Jalandhar, who, in turn, obtains it from Karnataka.
“In the beginning, other people only fed on tender coconut water during the summer, so I sold fruit juices in the winter. However, in recent years, soft coconut has remained among the most sought-after of the year,” Singh said. About 10 stalls of covered tender coconuts in Nangal, Runapar district, the city at the foot of the Himalayas.
All the stalls pile the remains of tender coconut shells under a nearby tree. Once a week, a mini-truck from the Jinda Jeev Be Sahara Charitable Society, a retirement home in the city, comes to pick them up. We collect about 1. 5 tons per week. We dried this hull in the sun for two months and then used it as cooking fuel. At six rupees a kilo, timber is too expensive,” said Ashok Sachdeva, who runs the asylum.
While Nangal baby coconut vendors can go a week without having their trash picked up, their counterparts in big cities are unable to do so due to lack of space. Ajay Raj, from West Delhi, goes to the nearest landfill every night to sell the baby coconuts. But Giri in Chennai collects his waste through a personal contractor who takes it to a treatment center. “Sometimes we have to pay the contractor to remove them,” Giri explained.
The comfortable coconut shell is biodegradable, but it’s a hard shell. It takes a long time to degrade due to its high moisture content and size. As the urban population turns to this healthy beverage, especially in the summer, the increasing amount of leftover tender coconut shells becomes a nuisance.
There are technologies that allow the successful reuse of the bale to create value-added products, such as compost, papermaking, sofa upholstery, etc. , but the root of the problem lies in the lack of separation of waste at source. According to residue control experts, the aim is to improve the involvement of civic bodies in the control of waste of special categories, such as soft coconut.
“All stakeholders – citizens, waste creditors and reparation agencies – will have to come together to achieve effective segregation, but only the government has the strength to enforce it,” said P. Natarajan, founder of the Namma Ooru Foundation, a non-governmental organization. For-profit organization. Working in waste control in Chennai.
Tender coconut water has been a popular drink, however, during the Covid-19 pandemic, other people have become more health-conscious and have learned its rehydration potential.
“It’s all the rage even in the northern states of India, where historically tender coconut water was not consumed. Today, about a portion of Karnataka’s soft coconut is transported to other states. I have consumers who follow specialized diets like keto and consume tender coconut water twice a day,” shared Swetha Sandesh, director of Niranthara Cokonut, which sells packaged soft coconut products, such as coconut water, coconut pulp, and ice cream.
According to Sandesh, other people now pay between 80 and 90 rupees in the cities. “They need it from the comfort of their own homes, so home deliveries have also increased and corporations that supply packaged tender coconut water are doing smart business. “she added.
“Consuming tender coconut water, ice cream and other products was not a trend in Kerala five or six years ago, even though almost every space here has a coconut tree. Even in recent years, the soft coconut used for those products comes from Tamil Nadu, vendors tell us. That’s because coconut oil is very expensive and we consume more of our coconuts,” said Arathi Ranjith, a documentary filmmaker from Kerala.
Soft coconut water has the same electrolyte balance point as human blood. It comprises sugars, minerals, and minor amounts of nitrogenous compounds in addition to potassium, its main nutrient. Therefore, it helps blood volume, focuses health, and prevents dehydration and stress. .
India is among the top 3 coconut-producing countries in the world, both being Indonesia and the Philippines. In 2021-2022, with an annual production of more than 19 billion walnuts, India accounted for 31. 45% of total global coconut production.
Although the area under coconut cultivation is higher than that of Indonesia and the Philippines, India, with 9,123 nuts per hectare, has a higher productivity than those two countries whose productivity per hectare is approximately 4,000 nuts per hectare.
In addition, 17 Indian states have coconut plantations, but 90% of the production comes from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh. Karnataka, with 30. 83%, is the largest producer. Maddur, in Mandya district between Bangalore and Mysore, is India’s largest wholesale market for soft coconuts.
Only 20% of a soft coconut is edible, so the rest deserves to be discarded. K. S. Raja runs Vizag Bioenergy Pvt Ltd in Vishakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh. The company produces compressed biogas (CBG) from biological waste. “When we started construction, the mythical waste we mined was usually tender coconut waste. It was completely intact, with a little discoloration,” Raja said. CBG plants get rid of tender coconut shells in the first step of their process.
Municipal companies that contract door-to-door garbage collection set tip rates based on weight. “Contractors just pick up the comfortable coconut shells because they’re heavy and most of the time they leave the rest of the residue. That’s why cities that are now striving to “deal with their mythical waste and find a lot of tender coconut shells there,” said a waste control expert from Chennai.
In Bengaluru, two to three hundred tonnes of soft coconut waste is produced every day, said an official at Bengaluru SWM Ltd, a branch of Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike. There are two coconut waste treatment facilities in the city that process around 30-40 tonnes of waste per day and the Bangalore Municipality is making plans to build another larger facility, with a capacity of one hundred tonnes per day, on the basis of a public-private partnership.
“Every day farmers in nearby villages take 150 to 200 tractors full of soft coconuts, which they use as fuel for cooking. Informally, soft coconut waste is diverted before it reaches the BBMP’s waste control system,” the official said. saying.
Soft coconut shell crushing plants separate the pith from the fibers. The first step is to weigh the peel into small pieces and then to a fine powder. After that, the fibers and marrow are separated into a mesh. A heavy motor is required to shred hard debris such as soft coconut.
The pith is the powder from which coconut peat is made, as well as incense sticks and briquettes. Soft coconut fiber is short (because the coconut is chopped on top) and immature for mature coconut fiber. Mature coconut fibres are widely used in the coir industry in Kerala.
“We compost the pith of tender coconut shells to make coconut peat moss that is used in gardens, nurseries, and landscaping. The fiber is sent to hatcheries to make beds for the chicks, as well as sofas and mattresses,” said Harshith Reddy, who runs SM Enterprises. which has the capacity to process 30 TPD of tender coconut waste.
Reddy regained his status quo in 2019 and says he’s faced several demanding situations since then. “In the beginning, the rainfall contractors wouldn’t allow us to pick up the shells because it affected their dumping costs. I have to operate the plant in a rented area and all my machines. they run on diesel,” Reddy said.
According to Reddy, given the capacity of their facilities, the main thing they do is prepare the raw fabrics such as pith and fiber and then give them to other brands that make products with them. The marrow is basically sent to composting plants.
Similarly, other cities have other agreements to deal with tender coconut shells. In Mumbai, the township is not satisfied with vendors’ shells. So, either the sellers pay to have them removed or they marry the processors. However, processors also think twice before picking up their products in such remote locations, as the cost of transportation reduces their profits.
In Chennai, either processors pick it up for a fee, or the one that is thrown on the side of the road is taken by municipal workers to a recycling facility, from where recyclers retrieve it.
“Soft coconut shell is only useful if it is collected separately,” said Kalyanee Paranjape, coordinator of the Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group, a nonprofit in Delhi that helps women’s self-help teams compost with soft coconut shell as a combined base. with other biodegradable materials, under its Magic Mitti brand.
“We added a layer of soft coconut husk as a base layer in our compost pit because it is rich in moisture and provides aeration and design for the compost pile. But it’s hard to find other people who will give us their tender coconut shell directly. Instead of throwing it away with the combined waste. Once in the landfill, it is dead because it is also infected with biomedical waste. Everywhere, landfills are full of waste and tender coconut shells take up space, generating emissions. According to the source, this total stay in the landfill can be avoided and the shell can be better utilized,” Paranjape explained.
Comfortable coconut shell is made up of fiber that adds lignin (30 to 42%) and cellulose (54 to 65%), as well as small amounts of tannin and potassium. Drying a tender coconut shell to use as a fuel source takes six months. As accumulation increases in medium-sized and giant cities, other technological interventions have appeared.
The Coir Board of India, which is part of the Ministry of Small, Medium and Micro Enterprises, has made progress in isolating lignin and cellulose from tender coconut shells. “Lignin can be converted into lignosulfonate, which has massive commercial programs. Lately we are bringing it up from Germany and China. La cellulose can be used to scale up adsorption products for biomedical programs such as dressings, scaffolds and diapers,” S said. Radhakrishnan, scientific director, Central Coconut Research Institute, Kerala, Mongabay-India.
Sodium lignosulfonate is used in lead-acid batteries, as a dilute powder in oil well drilling fluids, as a binder in roads, in animal feed preparations, as a dispersant in cement manufacturing, and as an anti-caking and tanning agent.
“We can make paper, air fresheners, disposable tableware, incense sticks and activated charcoal. Soft coconut compost is available in 60 to 90 days, compared to 30 days for coconut pith in general. Coir Board has developed all of those technologies and we continue to demonstrate them at our seminars and exhibitions for marketers to adopt commercially,” Radhakrishnan added.
Studies suggest that chemicals naturally found in the tender pith of coconut shells allow it to be pressed with heat into a binder-free particle that can be used as a wood replacement and also as briquettes. They have a low ash content, are odorless, and easy to transport.
However, in the field, those technologies are very usable, due to the load of electricity. “Even ethanol can be extracted by crushing tender coconut shells, but all of those technologies require enormous capital,” Reddy said.
“I haven’t found a single style where soft coconut has been processed effectively. Five years ago, a biogas plant based in Goa approached us to ask if we had a solution as they had a huge collection pile,” said Mr. Shankar, owner. of Arsta Eco Pvt Ltd, a company from Tumkur in Karnataka that produces biochar and biocarbon from the shell and shell of mature coconuts.
“The challenge with soft coconut is its maximum moisture content. Drying requires a lot of energy, which makes it economically unviable. Not many people are interested in making such a large investment in a single product,” Shankar said.
Sandesh created Fibware to reinvent his company’s tender leftover coconut shells into disposable tableware. “We separate the shell into pith and fibre and thermopress the fibre with a food-grade binder to make this tableware. We’re still in the early stages, so the scale “It’s small and the cost of production is high. With automatic machines and bulk production, we will soon be competing with areca palm plates,” Sandesh said.
A dish made of soft coconut fibre now costs 20 rupees, compared with 10 rupees for a dish made of areca palm, Sandesh reported. “Our electricity costs are 10 to 12 rupees per kg. “In the sun, we also have to use machines that require electrical power,” he said. According to Reddy, for the type of high-powered machines needed to crush soft coconuts, the power load of their facility would be forty-five lakh rupees. consistent with annum. ” I can’t even identify this connection in a rented room,” he explained.
While energy-intensive technologies hinder the scale-up of inventions in coconut processing, Natarajan of the Namma Ooru Foundation says the solution is to install microcomposting facilities.
“The processing of tender coconut requires space if it is done on a large scale and cities lack it. Our facility collects between one hundred and two hundred pieces each day and turns them into brown curtains for compost by shredding them and mixing them with dry leaves. and sugarcane residues. These brown curtains are rich in carbon and, combined with other nitrogen-rich biological waste, create quality compost. Many farmers only buy brown curtains from us because fiber stores water and help keep the soil free of weeds. ” said Natarajan.
With additional contributions from Aparna Hakin and Sumana Narayanan.
This article was first published on Mongabay.