A group of Mount Allison University students have developed a unique way of transforming recycled orange peels into a handy product that can be used every day.
“We are taking orange peel waste and we are repurposing them into making things like corkboards,” said third-year chemistry student Anas Iqelan.
The students are members of a social entrepreneurship project called Enactus, a national program that inspires and supports young people to use innovation and entrepreneurship to solve real-world problems.
“We are building on the waste problem in Florida. They have too many orange peels and nowhere to throw them out so this is one way to reduce waste,” said Iqelan.
According to the associate professor of chemistry, the students have developed a way to use orange peels gathered from the dining hall to make recyclable cork products that don’t use harmful chemicals in the production process.
The project started six years ago when previous students tried using potato scraps. But when that technique was unsuccessful, as scientists do, the students decided to try using oranges.
“We made a lot of little sort of hockey pucks, cookies and mushy stuff before. If you put them in water they would turn to mush,” said professor Andrew Grant.
After months of trials, they finally found the perfect pairing and peeling, said Grant. They dried and ground up orange peels to create an oatmeal-like base for the cork mould.
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Oranges were the perfect pick because they are fibrous and present an environmental concern.
“Citrus fruit which you might have eaten, many are acidic and that makes the soil acidic so you can’t actually grow plants efficiently,” said Padmapriya Srinivasan, who is the project’s research assistant.
Turning the peels into cork products also offers the market a corkboard that is more environmentally friendly.
“Instead of throwing this out, we recycle and make it into more of the same,” she said.
This past spring the group won the national Samsung Solve For Tomorrow contest. The competition is open to submissions for the upcoming year.
The winning recipe for the orange peel cork will be kept a secret, said Grant, because they hope to patent the idea and find a business to take it to market one day.
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