Good News Around The World: Entrepreneur Transforms Olive Waste into Eco-Friendly Fuel That Cuts CO2 Emission by One-Third...

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A Tunisian entrepreneur has found a way to turn the thousands of tons of fruit waste left over from making olive oil into fuel, reducing deforestation and cutting carbon emissions.



Negotiating a fraught business environment, he found a way to start a flourishing enterprise called Bioheat, which sells briquets of olive waste both at home and abroad.

Sandwiched between the vast nations of Libya and Algeria, the comparative sliver that is Tunisia punches way above its weight in agricultural production.

Olive cultivation goes back to Roman times, and the country’s rural households have traditionally used the olive waste as fuel or as animal feed. Tunisia is the third-largest olive oil producer in the world and the second-largest exporter of dates, and has relied heavily on the agro-economy for development.

With that mass of oil, though, comes mountains and mountains of byproduct. Eventually, the production of olive waste far outgrew the speed at which people used it for feeding their stoves, and 600,000 tons of olive “pomace” were piling up every year.

“I always wondered how this material could burn for so long without going out,” said Yassine Khelifi, an engineer who lives and works in the north of the country. “That’s when I asked myself: ‘Why not turn it into energy?'”

According to France 24, Khelifi visited Europe in 2018 on a mission to see if a machine existed that could turn the olive pomace into fuel of some kind. Locating such equipment and bringing it back to Tunisia, it took another 3 years of tinkering to finally produce briquets with just 8% moisture.

By comparison, seasoned firewood has to be left in the sun for a year or more, while olives can take half the time. At his factory where he employs 10 people, truckloads of olive waste are laid out to dry in the sun before being fed into the machine by workers. Long, hollow rolls are produced and cut into sections, packaged, and sold.

One Tunis pizza shop owner switched to using the briquets to reduce the smoke from his wood-fired oven, which irritated the locals. He said the waste “carries the soul of Tunisian olives and gives the pizza a special flavor,” while other patrons of Khelifi’s said it reduced their home heating costs by one-third.

About 60% of the briquets are exported, and Khelifi hopes to be producing 600 tons of them by the end of the year, at which point he’d be consuming a whole 1% of the country’s olive waste by himself.

Anyone who’s taken a train around the north or eastern coastline of the country, or stopped on the island of Djerba for a holiday and seen the scope of Tunisian olive production, will have some idea of how big that accomplishment is.