Though it’s really more apple cider weather here at Hackaday HQ, freshly-squeezed OJ is a treat that knows no season. Sure generates a lot of peel, though. Not something you think about when you’re used to buying it in jugs at the grocery store. What a waste, huh?
Italian design firm [Carlo Rotti] teamed up with global energy company [Eni] to develop “Feel the Peel”, a 10-foot-tall real-time juice bar that celebrates the orange by using the entire thing. Fifteen hundred juicy orbs move single-file down the circular track toward their total destruction. One at a time, they are severed in half and wrung out by the machine, and their peels are dropped into a clear bin for all to see. Once the peels dry out, they are shredded, mixed with PLA, and fed into a delta printer that prints juice cups right there on site.
This live process of reuse is pretty interesting to watch — check it out after the break. [Eni] touts this as completely circular, but that really depends on what happens to the cups. If they collect the empties and compost them, great. Anyway, it seems way more sustainable than the Juicero.
Thanks for the tip, [Qes].
Great!
A very effective crowd pleaser I’m sure.
I’m working on building my own filament maker but had not thought of orange peel!
How does orange oil affect PLA long term? I realize drink cups are disposable but it got me curious.
A certain percentage of the consumer needs to be converted to carbon and nitrogen to feed the orange trees for this to be truly circular.
Perhaps they could build a kiosk next to it to facilitate this.
Maybe a porta-potty would do the job…. :)
Catch the effluent coming out of the other end of the consumer and you capture those resources too. (And yes, there is work being done in this regard. Talk about having a shit job)
Suicide booth.
“The world is going to end and it is your fault! Do the environment a favor and become 100% organic fertilizer! You probably weren’t going to be very useful anyway.”
The problem with that has always been ensuring that human pathogens don’t end up being transmitted through the waste and ending up in the produce. You’d maybe want a double or triple cycle, like human waste to feed corn, feed corn to chickens, chickens produce eggs and manure which can be used on human crops. But then you’ve gotta worry about salmonella and avian flu still. It’s hard to find things that break cycle of all human pathogens.
You could sterilize the waste. That should get the pathogens.
Is orange peel waste actually a real problem?
No, but it makes real nice fertilizer. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/08/22/orange-new-green-how-orange-peels-revived-costa-rican-forest
Can also be used to feed cows… Though they’ll apparently get a bit drunk if it ferments.
That’s disgusting. Orange peels carry a host of bacteria and mold when left to “dry” but even worse is all the pesticides soaked in those peals.
Yes, Negative Nancy, I’m sure tons of bacteria survive the sort of temperature that PLA needs to be heated to in order to be extruded. Get a life.
Maybe not tons, but some rather nasty stuff can survive short periods of high temperature just fine. In a normal 3d printer the filament is probably only hot and molten for a few seconds which might not be enough to kill off any nastiness that is in the filament.
I’d have my reservations about drinking out of a cup like that.
The exact same thing is true of the orange juice, especially since a knife passes through the peel and then contaminates the interior of the fruit. Literally millions of people consume orange juice every morning which has been squeezed directly from the peel.
The idea that oranges (if briefly washed, as you should treat any produce or fruit directly from source) are a more substantial risk than any other lightly processed food or fruit is, at best, a highly contextual thing and unless agricultural regulations are absurdly relaxed in this location is about as safe as eating any food preserved in public.
You need to calm down. If you want to be mad at something here, be mad that the use of PLA is not food safe and creates unrecyclable plastic waste, which is an outrageous decision.
Just integrate a gamma source to sterilize the feedstock. Right?
He has a point though.
The pesticides are a real issue.
So is toxins left by bacteria and fungi.
So is other pollutants present due to the fact that orange peels are generally not intended to be eaten.
This is compounded by the fact that we know pretty much nothing about the amount of micro-particles (both of the PLA and the peel) that will leak out into the liquid, nor how the acidity of the liquid interact with them.
Take off your rose-colored glasses, damn hipster.
PLA is not foodsafe.
Umm… Yes it is. In fact it is so safe that it is used to make disolvable stitches! Certainly something which can be safely dissolved directly into tissues and bloodstream is safe to ingest!
What you might mean to say is that filaments which aren’t specifically marketed as food safe might not be. This is due to the possibility of additives, including the coloring not being food safe. Also if it wasn’t meant to be eaten it probably wasn’t handled under as strict of procedures as food normally is. It might just have too much dust in it from the factory floor!
None of this is the same as saying that the PLA content itself is non food safe. I didn’t see anything here indicating that the PLA used in these cups wasn’t specifically chosen to be food safe. Did I miss that?
Yeah man, this sort of caution-to-the-wind works in the lab, but the food industry is a different story. The video literally shows a little kid touching the oranges… The list of steps that have a high probability of tainting the end product is huge with this thing.
Juicero++ ? This is sort of what that should have been. I’ve gotten unexpectedly interested in automated food preparation lately.
Thankfully, oranges have an infinite shelf life….
Are there holes in the side of those cups? I would totally dump OJ on myself.
Cool idea though.
Yeah, on both sides. In the video, it looks like they also offer regular, non-dribble cups.