Reduce thirst for electricity with coconut

US researchers believe that the parts that humans are not using in coconut and mangoes can generate a large amount of electricity for rural communities in South Asia and Southeast Asia.

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Many food plants have a hard and inedible part. People do not use those parts to feed cattle or make fertilizer on fields. Examples of this type of scrap - called "inner pods" - include almonds, coconut shells and pistachio pods, mango seeds, olive seeds, plum seeds, apricot hat, cherry seeds.

Vietnam is one of the coconut producing countries in the world.

The fruit peel contains lignin, a chemical compound, with a high content. Lignin-rich products can be burned to create an energy-rich gas. People can use that gas to produce electricity.

In the Science and Development Network page , in the process of searching for regions that produce many pods, researchers found that coconut accounted for 55% of the total volume of fruit products in the world. This number is 17% for mangoes. Most coconuts are produced in South Asia and Southeast Asia - including Bangladesh, Laos, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.

Tom Shearin, a University of Kentucky system analyst in the United States, and colleagues found that the energy from farm produce in pods could meet 30 percent of Sri Lanka's electricity needs. Similar rates in the Philippines, Indonesia and India are 25%, 13% and 3% respectively.

The use of inedible parts of mangoes and coconuts to produce electricity will not face the opposition of experts because they are not competitive with food crops, Shearin said.

Wais Kabir, chairman of Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute, said that most of the country's agricultural waste, including waste from inedible products, has been used to produce bioenergy. However, he asserts that the amount of waste from agricultural products - such as coconut shells - is not large enough to meet the long-term operation of the power plant. In order to create a material source large enough for power plants, people have to plan their production on a large scale.