Takachar
Country: India
Award: Finalist
Most crop and forest residues (biomass) are loose, wet, bulky, and too expensive to collect and transport to a centralized plant for conversion or disposal. As such, most rural communities are shut out from the benefits of the emerging bioeconomy; burning such residues in open-air is often the only recourse. We are developing small-scale, low-cost, portable systems that can latch onto the back of tractors and even donkey carts to deploy to farms and forest landings to locally upgrade and densify the residues on-site into higher-value, customizable bioproducts, without requiring any external energy/chemical input. The bioproducts include biofuels, carbon-rich fertilizers, and even higher-grade chemicals. Many of these products have demand in the local community, allowing us to complete the waste-to-value loop and build self-sufficient rural bioeconomies that no longer depend on potentially vulnerably supply chains to import their commodities.