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You see all sorts of Orange oil products today in cleaning agents and furniture polishes. Orange oil also burns nicely, making it an ideal substance to burn in a lantern. Yet every time you eat an orange, you peel it, eat it, and throw away the rinds.
What if every home had a device for using the
rinds? An oil extractor? It would shred up the rinds, and squeeze the oil out of them. You wouldn't get much out of each orange, but if you ate a lot of oranges you might be able to collect a significant portion of orange oil. You could burn it in a small lantern, use it as an air freshener, make household cleaning products, or sell it to a company and make a profit. (Citrus Petroleum, anyone?) Also, the shredded rinds could be used in recipes needing them.
I wonder if you could power a car on orange oil...
Driving on orange oil
http://en.wikipedia...ki/Orange_oil_tires
[MaxwellBuchanan, Apr 13 2015]
[link]
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You could power a "lemon" with lemon oil. |
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Prioritize the dumping of citrus peels to the bottom of a waste landfill, and after sufficient time, heat, and pressure just mine the oily carbonaceous strata and bottle up any ooze that can be pumped away. “Place your citrus peels, seeds, and pulp as well as citrus tree leaves and cuttings into the orange recycling container at curbside” |
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In a GCSE chemistry class I extracted orange oil. First we
collected up orange peels for weeks. Then we spent
probably half an hour scraping the pith off the rind. When
we had maybe 100 to 200 cm^3 of peelings - enough to
fill
the round bottomed flask - we distilled the oil under
reflux.
(Correction : probably not with reflux - likely mis-
remembering that.)
We managed to extract something less than 2 mls of oil. |
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I'm sure you /could/ power a car with orange oil... but
probably not very far. |
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You can certainly drive on orange oil, according to
<link> |
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A friend works in the oil room of the citrus plant a few miles
from here. He makes orange oil.
Cattle love the part of the peels that are left. |
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Like most such schemes, the limiting factor is efficiencies of
scale. When you're dealing with a massive juicing
operation, it's worth the cost of the plant to recover. When
you're at home, the extraction plant will cost much more
than the oil recovered from it. |
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So how many miles do you get to the orange? |
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Seriously, though, one of the interesting things about
renewable energy is that often
the product is so low-grade that it won't scale up easily
to global scale - "diseconomies
of scale" start to bite.
For example with dedicated biofuel production the raw
product (wood, pampas grass,
whatever) is relatively heavy and bulky; you don't have to
transport it very far before
you've used more joules than it can yield. |
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As MechE points out above, orange peel is a nice
exception for the case of a large
juicing plant - it is effectively concentrating the resource
as a side-effect, and processing yields a high-value (and
energy-dense) product. |
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But as I think is now clear, this just isn't an option for
home-owners. Well, unless they
could band together and donate them to an upcycling
centre (disclaimer: self-
promotion).
Failing that, I dry them out and burn
them as firelighters... don't like
that? Google tells me there are :
15 Surprising Uses for Orange Peels
5 Good Uses for Your Citrus Peels
14 Amazing Benefits and Uses Of Orange Peels For
Beauty
10 Amazing Ways To Use Orange Peels
and
8 Ways to Use Citrus Fruit Peels in the Home and Garden |
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My local supermarket uses orange peel as a packaging
for oranges. |
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//My local supermarket uses orange peel as a packaging for
oranges.// |
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You should join a campaign to get them to cut down on
excess packaging. Ostentatiously peel your oranges before
you leave. |
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I do _everything_ ostentatiously. |
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