Assuming that trash is not a technological issue but an industrial design issue instead, Agrumigel finished in the past few years a special project closing its own factory track and producing almost no refuse.  This plan allowed the company to minimize refuse output, to gain by-products for sale, to have a good image in the market and to have environmental awareness. A citrus company processing produce mainly 2 kind of trash: citrus “pastazzo” (animal food, for about the 50-60% of processed fruits!) and waste water. The citrus waste issue has been solved converting it in a precious asset for the dried peel production process either for animal feeding and pectin.  Waste water is introduced instead in a purification system which ends with the “biogas” production through two digesters. These activities give no money income to the Company but generate costs instead. The costs on one side are way lower than the other costs the company would have through usual legal waste disposal.

For the waste washing-waters and pressing liquid we can say it is our proud to use those wastes to produce distillates. This process is our flagship and we want to show you the following newspaper article:

Citrus waste’s ethanol: American idea? No, it’s Sicilian.

Lately ethanol production by cellulosic biomass, particularly of citrus, makes News. InoesBio, a company in Florida, is going to put into the market “the very first orange bio-ethanol supply”.  Billionaire funding, even from government, would have contributed to make this dream comes true.
In the USA, the idea of ​​investing in bio-fuels from residues of citrus processing dates back to the commitments made in 2009 in the renewable energy legislation field, with a production threshold from which the American industry is light years away, set one billion gallons. In the same year the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that it had perfected the process of transformation from citrus waste that, after almost a luster, could bear the desired results. But there is a Sicilian company that beat everyone to it also without receiving any public aid. The Agrumi-Gel, located in the province of Messina, began its research and development activities in 2005 and has been producing ethanol from its own production waste since 2009, i.e. when elsewhere in the world began to work just on an idea which was still underway of study and evolution.

Furthermore, our distillate has been approved for human use, thus extending its application range so far limited  for Bio-fuel production. The increase in its applications will generate a progressive and more than proportional increase in the market possibilities of the product. The Company’s goal remains to further enhance the products obtained from citrus processing and, precisely for this reason, the research does not stop. The Agrumi-gel has thus started a close collaboration with several Italian Universities (the Universities of Palermo, Messina and Salerno, as well as  La Sapienza University of Rome and the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa) in order to enhance its own Research and Development department. The aim of the research is to develop, in the short term, the production of yeasts, molds and proteins for food in livestock and the production of organic dried soil improver for use in agriculture. Crossing new frontiers while discovering new ones makes the R&D department an excellence for Agrumi-Gel.