Going green with castor bean
Volunteer Elliot Hohn has been busy developing a process to convert coffee fruit and castor beans into biodiesel. His ultimate goal is to have all of As Green As It Gets™' local roasting fueled by castor oil.
About a year after planting, the seeds pods can be harvested.
The seed pods are set in the sun to dry.
When the pods are dry, our high-tech threshing process removes the beans from the shell.
The oil is warmed and mixed with alcohol and lye in this batch processor, made almost entirely from donated parts.  It is allowed to settle, and glycerin is removed from the lower taps for future use in soap production.
That’s the manufacturing process, but the ripple effect goes on.  We’ll soon be roasting our coffee using fuel derived from our farmer’s coffee fields.  That means our fuel is renewable, and not dependent on petroleum.  Our “refining process” is clean and smoke free, creating no pollution or waste.   The entire process has a negative carbon footprint.  That means that even though we’re burning a hydrocarbon fuel, the amount of CO2 we put in the air is less than the amount we absorbed through cultivating the castor beans.    It means our farmers have a secondary cash crop planted with their coffee.  People in the community not involved with As Green As It Gets earn income from castor sales.  We’ll be starting demonstration castor plots in three communities this planting season.
First, the castor plant is intercropped with coffee.  It provides shade to coffee plants in the early years while the shade trees are still young.
The beans are then fed into a press - courtesy of our friends at Valhalla Experimental Station - and oil is created (along with 22 lbs of high grade organic fertilizer with each gallon of oil).
The resultant product is close facsimile of kerosene or home heating oil.