🔥 Every year, $120 billion worth of crop and forest residues are burned outside worldwide.
👨🏼🌾 Most farmers burn their crop residues to dispose of waste from the previous crop; these residues are often bulky, too costly to collect, and too expensive to transport to a centralized location, to be converted into valuable products.
👉 As a result, open burning of agricultural waste has an environmental impact and is also an economic loss for farmers.
💡 A solution was found by Takachar, an MIT spin-off startup founded in 2015 by Kevin Kung and Vidyut Mohan.
🚜They created a portable machine that can be either attached to the back of tractors or installed in farms.
⚙️The machine is auto-thermal - no fuel or external heat required -, therefore making it a very cost-effective invention.
📝 How it works: it uses the torrefaction process to transform crop residues into bioproducts. This process densifies the biomass at high temperatures (200 to 300°C), converting the plant material into compact charcoal.
The resulting products become biofuel, fertilizer or activated carbon.
💰 This invention has significant advantages and allows farmers to:
- Increase their income, as they no longer need to buy fertilizer,
- Reduce pollution and carbon emissions,
- Resell their processed bioproducts on the market.
🥇 Takachar's innovation has won several awards, including Prince William's @earthshotprize Award and the @xprizeCarbon Removal competition funded by Elon Musk and his Musk Foundation.
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