Health News Week #9
USDA Lab Is Turning Billions of Pounds of Almond Waste Into Beer, Plastic, And Power
Researchers in Berkeley are now discovering ways to recycle almond was and turn it into power, beer and plastic. For every pound of almonds they get about two pounds of hulls. The hulls are were each tiny almonds grows inside a shell and this is what they utilize for the recycling method. The hulls are used in “cogeneration” to make electricity, they are compressed kinda of like coal. Usually plastic is stiff or have heat stability but the almond shells can turn the plastic black and sometimes gray sometimes these targets can be used for others things as well. They are also working on extracting the sugar from the hulls and utilizing it for bee feeding.
This seems like an awesome use for a byproduct that would otherwise be useless. California grows a lot of almonds, so these innovations would be particularily useful here. However, the same idea could be applied across the country or globe to turn other by-products into a new good. This method seems more sustainable and less hazardous to our environment than other means of producing plastic or compared to using coal.
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