KOTA KINABALU: The Environmental Biotechnology Research Group (EB Group) from Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) has come up with five new technology projects which are able to drastically reduce air and water pollution produced from palm oil mills in Sabah.
The projects, which had been developed in a laboratory plant in UPM Serdang, are capable of achieving zero-discharge from palm oil mills, EB Group leader Professor Dr Mohd Ali Hassan said during the Promotion of Green Economy Project with Palm Oil Industry for Bio Diversity Conservation Workshop at Tun Mustapha Tower here yesterday morning.
The workshop also witnessed the acceptance signing ceremony by Datuk Yap Yun Fook, managing director of Keningau Palm Oil Mill Sdn Bhd, in the presence of secretary of Natural Resources Office in Sabah, Amat Md Yusof.
Under the agreement, Keningau Palm Oil Mill Sdn Bhd will accept the proposal by EB Group to utilize 5% to 10% of Yap’s palm oil mill as the research group’s first pilot plant mill.
The projects were put together by EB Group in collaboration with Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Hyushu Institute of Technology Japan, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Sciences and Technology, and Kyushu University of Japan.
According to Mohd Ali, the pilot plant project in Keningau Palm Oil Mill would operate five projects proposed by EB Group and would be an example to the rest of the palm oil mills in the country by the time they are launched in April next year.
By using our simple and newly introduced technology, we are confident that our pilot plant mill will produce zero discharge of water waste and methane gas into the air, Mohd Ali said.
Right now the State and Federal Governments have set 20 Parts Per Million (ppm) of Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD) to be the maximum level of BOD to be discharged into the river from palm oil mills, which is very clean.
However, it costs the industry a lot of money to clean the discharge to achieve quality, he said.
Thus, Mohd Ali said that the problem between the palm oil industry and the environment could be solved with the technology, the Biochar, from one of the five projects that EB Group is introducing.
Biochar is a simple technology produced from the palm oil biomass itself that has activated carbon and has the ability to absorb pollutants from water discharge, and make the discharge as clean as drinking water.
Biochar which is used to treat water does not even need to be purchased as it is found in the palm oil biomass itself. Furthermore, the treated water (clean water) could be re-used for the palm oil mills. This is why we call our project zero-discharged project, he explained.
Mohd Ali, who is also the Dean of the Faculty of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences UPM, told the Borneo Post that currently, most of the palm oil mills in the country are still using the traditional way of handling their waste.
He said that waste discharged from palm oil mills could be categorized into three groups: the clean one in which no treatment is needed, the normal one in which normal treatment is needed, and the dirty one in which the waste need to be treated for a period of time before releasing to the river.
The traditional method which most of the palm oil mills is using is that they would combine all three groups of discharge, and treat them together. Not only that this would take a bigger space and treatment operation and cost, it (method) would also take a longer time.
In one of the projects that we propose to Keningau Mill is to separate the three groups of oil by using our proposed shapes of containers and by altering the temperature, Mohd Ali explained while adding that the project involves very simple science and the technology is affordable by all mills.
He also explained that in the traditional way in which the three groups of discharge are combined, the pollution level of BOD is higher: 30,000 to 40,000 ppm compared to discharge via the research group’s technology, which would be less than 10,000PPM of BOD.
This makes the discharge from the new technology easier to treat, he said.
Mohd Ali also pointed out that the waste water that most of the palm oil mills are treating and discharging actually contains value and could be sold.
He said that the oil discharge from sterilization process, which in the traditional way, is mixed with the other groups of discharges and treated before releasing to the river, contains 1% of Crude Palm Oil (CPO) that could still be utilized and 4% of wax which could be extracted and sold.
We have companies from Japan which are interested in purchasing this wax that we have been throwing away, he said.
As for the reduction of air pollution, Mohd Ali said that the current palm oil mills released methane gas, which is one of the gases that contributes to the green house effect and global warming.
However, with his proposed project, the EB Group is able to extract methane gas from the waste water and collect it for biogas production.
Meanwhile, Yap said that the Keningau Palm Oil Mill Sdn Bhd is hopeful that the projects proposed by the EB Group could contribute to better environment.
The Promotion of Green Economy with Palm Oil Industry for Bio Diversity Conservation project was initially planned to be based in Segama River Basin of Kinabatangan.
However, due to security and safety reasons, the EB Group has chosen Keningau Palm Oil Mill’s 4,000 hectares to be the base of their projects which are funded by the Japan International Corporation Agency (JICA).