Scientists from the United Kingdom’s Northumbria University (located in historic Newcastle, once the center of the British coal industry) and their partners in Pakistan are converting banana waste into eco-friendly textiles and clean energy, according to Shubhangi Dua, writing in Interesting Engineering.

According to the report, banana farming in Pakistan creates 80 million tons of agricultural waste that can be converted into 57,488 million cubic meters of syngas – enough to deliver clean electricity to half of rural Pakistan. The SAFER project, which seeks to improve access to sustainable energy in rural Pakistan using food and fiber agro-waste, has been awarded a £300,000 grant (about U$396,000) from Innovate UK to develop the waste-to-energy tech.

According to Dr. Jibran Khaliq, a materials scientist from Northumbria’s department of mechanical and construction engineering, Pakistan’s textile sector has been responsible for significant environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, and microplastics. But, he says, “Our partners at the National Textile University in Faisalabad have developed a technology to convert banana agro waste into textile fibers.”

The problem with implementing this technology is “the lack of electricity in rural Sindh where the majority of bananas are grown,” which “has prevented this innovation from being scaled up until now.” The grant money will enable Dr. Khaliq’s team to develop a new waste-to-energy technology that will convert the banana waste into clean, affordable energy.

Dr. Muhammad Saghir, Director at Eco Research Ltd., says that, “This innovative approach will not only transform agricultural byproducts into sustainable textiles but also exemplifies a remarkable synergy between eco-conscious practices and technological advancements leading to local job creation.” An added benefit is that the process even produces biofertilizers that will boost soil health and food production.

Why is this development such a big deal?

With a 2024 projected production of 215,000 metric tons of bananas, less than 0.02 percent of the total world production in 2022 of 135 million metric tons, Pakistan is a far cry from ever becoming a major banana producer. Yet that tiny production generates, we are told, 80 million tons of waste.

Worldwide production of bananas was just 22 million metric tons in 1961 and only 66 million tonnes in 2000. Yet today electricity-poor India alone produces 35 million metric tons of bananas – and untold tonnages of banana waste. [Banana plants bear fruit only once in their lifetime.]

Other major banana producers include Brazil, Nigeria, the Philippines, Indonesia, Kenya, Burundi, Egypt, Rwanda, Tanzania, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, Angola, and a host of Central American nations, as well as China. The leading producers of plantains and cooking bananas, which produce similar waste levels, include Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Cameroon, and Cote d’Ivoire, along with several other nations, many of which also generate only tiny amounts of electricity today.

The concept of using banana waste for generating electricity is not new. In a 2010 paper, “Banana biomass as potential renewable energy resource,” lead author Uing Yan Tock reported on a Malaysian case study that chose the banana plant as a biomass source because of its availability, high growth rates, carbon neutrality, and the fact that it bears fruit only once.

Yan Tock said that conversion of banana biomass to energy can be done via combustion, supercritical water gasification, and digestion to produce thermal energy and biogas. The theoretical power generation calculated reached a maximum of 950 megawatts, which would meet more than half of the renewable energy requirement of Malaysia’s Fifth Fuel Policy.

There are only two primary methods for converting biomass into energy: gasification (as with the Pakistan effort) and pyrolysis. Gasification heats solid or liquid biomass to about 1,800^o F to produce the biofuel syngas and biochar solids, which also have agricultural applications. In flash pyrolysis, the biomass is heated only to 1,100^o F at pressures up to 5 bar in an inert atmosphere.

In a 2022 paper, lead author Wanderson O. Silva of Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fedérale de Lausanne describes a new biomass method that produces syngas and biochar using flashlight pyrolysis – a significant advance in renewable energy technology. The method uses a Xenon lamp to trigger photothermal reactions in biomass materials like banana peels and coffee beans.

In another 2022 article, lead author Ashish N. Sawarkar of the Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology in India stated that various types of banana waste generated after banana crop cultivation have tremendous potential for bioethanol production. He added that the number of publications focusing on banana waste-to-energy had increased from just seven prior to the 2010 Malaysia study to 177 in 2021.

With world energy needs expected to double in the next decades, and with many banana-producing nations woefully short in electricity availability, these developments in bananas to energy may soon become a rapidly growing industry.

At the virtual outset of bananas to energy research (the 2010 Malaysian study), scientists admitted there were “issues” involved in recovering the feedstock, storage problems, and financial and technical challenges to be solved before banana crop residue could provide a major source of energy for energy-starved nations.

The latest research suggests that many of these hurdles are being overcome, but until banana waste to energy can be proven to be a cost-effective alternative to other renewables or even to abundant fossil fuels, most of that waste will continue to pile up.

Yet one thing is certain. The idea of banana waste to energy has an increasing appeal.

This piece originally appeared at CFACT.org and has been republished here with permission.