How People Profit Off Pineapple Scraps | World Wide Waste | Insider Business

800 square miles worldwide enough to cover New York City 10 times over but about half of every fruit ends up as waste Carmen ijosa wants to convince Growers they can turn a profit from their leftovers it's really the Queen of of fibers famous Brands like Nike already use her product called peanutex and Carmen is not alone entrepreneurs in other parts of the world are making money

from Pineapple scraps here are three companies turning the fruit into textiles disposable plates and eco-friendly cleaners the idea for textiles made from pineapples is nothing new it actually dates back to the 1500s pineapples come from South America but once they made their way to Europe the fruit became a status symbol gifted to royalty like King Charles II and Spanish King Ferdinand II the Spanish brought the

fruit to the Philippines where locals turned it into a fabric called Pina it was mainly used to make barong Tagalog a traditional formal shirt that centuries-old technique inspired Carmen when she first heard about it 30 years ago I was working with leather at the time but I realized the unsustainability of the leather manufacturing processes and I discovered natural fibers pineapple leaves turned out to have the

perfect mix of strength and flexibility and they can grow up to six feet long that gave me the idea of what if I make Amish not unlike what leather is she spent decades perfecting her process before she launched her company ananas Anam in 2016. at the start it was really like what what are you doing you know why not keep using leather her research resulted in

two different products Pina text which mimics the qualities of animal leather and Pina yarn a replacement for yarn I'm a one you can call a Serial entrepreneur ananasanam partners with the Dole Sunshine Company and independent Farmers to employ over 500 people workers Harvest pineapple leaves that would otherwise be burned or left to rot and run them through a machine that extracts the fibers the sun dries

and Browns them in just a few hours the fibers are then shipped to Barcelona to become Pina yarn this machine acts like a guillotine chopping the longer strands into manageable pieces a carting machine straightens the fibers then grinds them until they resemble cotton the Baler compacts the mass into tight squares the fibers are then transported to Portugal where they're spun into the final product to make

pinatex a needle punching machine knits those same ground fibers with threads made from cornstarch the result is a thick fabric the sheet passes through a 30 meter long conveyor belt to be dyed and dried a resin made from plants and petroleum is used for color and adds durability then a heated roller flattens the textile and dries the resin the company says it's working to make peanutex

entirely plant-based pinatex is 95 made from renewable resources so we've got a five percent to work on one square meter of pinatex uses around 16 pineapple plants worth of leaves the company says it saves 825 tons of leaves from being burned each year ananasanam sells its products to Big Brands like Nike and Hugo Boss along with smaller companies that make notepads backpacks and Handbags ecosa says

she plans to explore other textile Alternatives in the future I'm here in Spain and I'm already looking at what is being used traditionally you come back to me in two years time and I will answer this question pineapple leaves might be good for making textiles but what about the rest of the fruit in Colombia a company called life back shreds pineapple crowns to make compostable plates

the mixture is Blended with recycled paper and turned into sheets that are left out to dry Under the Sun a machine presses the sheets into form if these disposable plates end up in a place with Soil and Water tiny seeds inside will blossom in just a few days generated on a busy day workers at lifepak can turn out 10 000 eco-friendly plates is in addition to

plates the company also makes sandwich containers and coffee cup sleeves that contain seeds from edible plants like cilantro amaranth and strawberry life pack caps its own carbon footprint by working with local suppliers foreign the plant's owners charge nothing for the pineapple crowns they're happy that someone is willing to turn their waste into a resource is important husband and wife team Claudia Barona and Andres benavidez founded

life Pack 12 years ago in the city of Kali the couple has won several small Business Awards and they even appeared on the Colombian version of Shark Tank is Colombia like nearly every country in the world is trying to reduce plastic waste in 2017 the country introduced a tax on single-use Plastics that increases each year and in some cities informal Pickers are now paid as Municipal

workers but getting consumers to buy these products isn't easy is the life pack plates retail at about two and a half dollars per dozen that's more than double the price of plastic plates from a big box store despite their higher price point lifepec has been able to capitalize on growing demand for sustainable packaging which has increased by 40 since the company started its plates are now

sold in three large Supermarket chains domestically the company also handles dozens of orders through its website each week with a handful of customers in the U.S Platos is is life Pack's next challenge is to modernize its equipment so it can boost production Andres and Claudia also plan to franchise the business and expand into new countries to help more people cut back on plastic one Plate at

a time even if you don't eat off of pineapple plates you can still use the fruit to do the dishes in Vietnam one company uses pineapple Peels and cores to make natural soaps and detergents the founder lead DUI Huang says they're safer for the planet and people so safe he drinks the stuff every day fermented fruit is part of a new trend cleaning with enzymes instead

of harsh chemicals does it actually work throughout history people have used all sorts of stuff to wash up everything from animal fat to human urine in the early 20th century scientists figured out how to make suds in a lab using fossil fuels that paved the way for all kinds of synthetic gels powders and cleaning chemicals which are all detergents so much wider she can actually see

the difference instantly the problem is they were full of stuff that water treatment plants weren't built to clean out like phosphorus and nitrogen when those elements flood waterways they can make algae grow faster creating thick layers of muck that suffocate Life Below that's exactly what happened in North America in the 1960s Lake Erie is almost biologically dead today detergent pollution has spread around the world foaming

up rivers and fueling overgrown algae fuwa biotech is betting that fruit cleaners are the next chapter for cleaning products the name fua comes from the phrase fruit Warrior the company buys fruit waste from a factory that makes canned pineapple workers here chopped thousands of them every day this pile is from just a half day's work these used to rot in nearby landfills creating bad smells and

methane a powerful Planet warming gas now workers load the scraps onto a Truck and Travel about two miles to the production site here the team unloads the fruit skins and washes themselves next they mix together the first ingredients sugar and water uses about two metric tons of sugar every month workers add the pineapple peels to the sugar water and wait for the mixture to start to

ferment fermentation is when microbes like bacteria or Yeast break down complex molecules like sugar into simpler stuff like alcohol it's how barley becomes beer and grapes become wine at fua fermentation is how waste becomes cleaning fluids but the secret isn't alcohol it's the enzymes and acids the pineapples will release enzymes are molecules that speed up chemical reactions like digestion in the human body certain enzymes can

fight germs by entering cells and breaking them apart from the inside this can either kill bacteria or just slow them down enough that they probably won't make you sick but to make those germs stopping enzymes from Plants you have to ferment the right mix of ingredients for just the right amount of time workers here stir the mixture every day after about a month it looks like

this by two months this glob of bacteria and microorganisms forms that's how you know it's working the founders don't keep any of their process a secret Huang says he learned this technique from ponbong she's a scientist and Buddhist nun who figured out the formula then shared it freely for others to use after the mixture ferments for three months there's enough acid and enzymes for it to

work as a cleaner now it's ready to be filtered foreign the leftover solids become fertilizer for nearby Farms and the remaining liquid is the base for everything fuwa makes things fua buys those oils from local farmers who make them using agricultural waste like stems and leaves the final mixture is bottled and shipped to mini Marts around Vietnam or to online customers in most countries one bottle

of dish soap sells for just over two dollars Huang says that's less than the cost of similar imported products [Music] fuwa uses an on-site lab to test its products and it looks at competitor stuff as well measuring the ph and testing for other additives cleaning with fermented fruit is a fairly new concept but there's evidence it has a lot of potential researchers compared a pineapple enzyme

mixture to bleach in water and found it killed one type of bacteria equally well and early research suggests fruit enzymes might even make Wastewater cleaner we know more about common chemical cleaners like bleach they kill lots of germs but come with other risks Huang started making fruit cleaners when his wife now the company's CEO developed eczema um [Music] [Music] Studies have linked cleaning products to skin

irritation and breathing problems including asthma when used and stored properly they're safe for most people but mixing bleach with the wrong cleaners can create deadly gas which happens thousands of times per year in the United States so could we one day replace household bleach and detergents with fermented pineapples we asked an expert you'll be surprised yes totally yes but he also said we need more research

there's only certain number of bacteria that has been tested so probably got to do a wide range of studies with a wide range of microorganisms to ensure that it's really effective enzyme cleaners pose another challenge shelf life it would be one of the major issues with certain temperature it might be inactivated fuwa says its products can last about two years which is about as long as

most chemical cleaning sprays still fua has more work to do with so much pineapple processing in the region the company says it has lots of waste to work with but mainly the founders want people to know there's a gentler alternative foreign [Music] thank you know what you want [Music]