From Waste to Wealth: Takachar’s Portable Biomass Revolution

Takachar’s mission is to dramatically increase the amount of crop/forest residues (biomass) economically converted into higher-value bioproducts in rural, underserved communities worldwide. Most rural biomass residues are loose, wet, and bulky, making them difficult/expensive to collect/transport to a centralized place for conversion. Takachar’s small-scale, low-cost, portable biomass conversion equipment can be latched onto the back of tractors/pick-up trucks to process locally available residues into higher-value, carbon-negative bioproducts such as fertilizer blends, chemicals, and biofuels.  

After harvest, many crops produce residues on the farm that cannot be used as mulch or animal feed. The presence of these residues can often impede the growth of the next crop. Farmers typically only have a short window of at most 15 days to clear the residues such as rice straw or maize husks in order to begin preparing the land for the next planting.

So far, the fastest and cheapest way to address residue removal is simply by setting it on fire in the field, which is widely practiced in many emerging economies such as India. However, burning residues has been attributed to air pollution that affects the respiratory health not only of the local farming communities, but also of nearby urban centres such as Delhi (Subramanian, 2016). Therefore, many local governments have begun clamping down on open-air residue burning, sometimes going as far as fining the farmers.

However, from the perspective of farmers, there is no feasible alternative to open-air residue burning. Many farmers we have interviewed have even offered to pay around $15/acre (around 3 labor-days/acre) to have balers or middlemen remove their residues in a timely manner from the field, but they have not found willing takers (Mohan, 2018). The reality is that crop residues are loose, wet, bulky, and geographically distributed, which make them very costly (more than $15/acre) to collect and transport, either to a disposal site or to a centralized facility for subsequent conversion into fuel, fertilizer, or other chemicals.

In India, around 40 million farmers regularly plant crop varieties such as that yield in-field residues after harvest without immediate economic benefit. In the world, there are about 170 million similar farmers. Beyond agricultural residues, even in American and Canadian communities, the build-up and open-air burning of woody residues can contribute to catastrophic, property- and life-destroying wildfires. In total, there are more than 4 billion tonnes of non-merchantable biomass residues. Assuming that a $30/tonne value could be created out of these residues rather than being burned, this could mean an additional income opportunity of around $120 billion/year for these farmers.

Photo of crop residue burning in India: 

Currently, most rural communities are shut out from the benefits of the emerging bioeconomy, because their locally available crop and forest residues (biomass) are loose, wet, bulky, variable, and too expensive to collect and centralize for subsequent conversion into useful biofuel and bioproducts. Such biomass residues are often left to decompose or burned in open-air, contributing to air pollution and wildfire hazard. Existing biomass conversion technologies are often incompatible in these contexts are they are too large-scale, centralized, and cannot handle the highly variable nature of the input materials. Takachar is developing low-cost, small-scale, portable, and feedstock-flexible systems (known as the Takavator) capable of being attached to the back of tractors and pick-up trucks (pictured below) to deploy to remote, hard-to-access areas to locally upgrade the non-merchantable residues into higher-value bioproducts such as biofuel precursors, fertilizers, or advanced chemicals. Dependent on the local real-time market demand for such bioproducts, we utilize built-in sensors, local market and physical data, and machine learning to develop a robust control system capable of coordinating a fleet of mobile, smart reactors to produce the right type of product in real time. This effort leads to a distributed production and consumption of key energy and chemical products from local renewable biomass sources within rural communities, rather than a centralized production (often from fossil-based, energy-/carbon-intensive sources) and transportation from afar. Therefore, we help rural communities become self-sufficient and independent from the expensive, imported chemical and fertilizer alternatives. At the same time, our carbon-negative bioproducts enable rural communities most affected by climate change to access the financial and ecological benefits of the carbon credits for the first time, thereby promoting environmental justice. 

Figure: Takachar’s small-scale, low-cost, portable biomass thermochemical conversion unit.

So far we have deployed around 10 Takavators in India, Kenya, USA, and Canada in collaboration with local implementation partners. Our solution has benefitted more than 10,000 farmers. Carbon credits being generated have been sold to Klarna Bank and WRLD Foundation through the Milkywire Climate Transformation Fund. 

At the heart of our company, we serve the underdogs, and this is enshrined in our company’s core culture and values. Our decentralized, low-cost, and portable solution overwhelmingly benefits and caters to rural, underserved communities most affected by climate change (e.g. wildfires), thereby achieving climate justice and building local resilience. Our decentralized process retains 90% of the labour and value within local communities, often also selling the bioproducts locally, thereby reducing communities’ dependence on centralized production of chemicals (e.g. fertilizers) that is not only costly and carbon-intensive, but also vulnerable to supply chain disruptions (e.g. COVID, international sanctions). As these carbon-negative activities are generated in rural communities, they also get to access the carbon credits aggregated and verified through our IoT and cloud-based control system. From day one, in developing our product, we have taken a use-centric customer discovery process, where we integrate the perspectives and feedback from rural, disadvantaged communities in our design process. Indeed, some of the most salient improvements in our product and business model came directly from these end users. The following enumerates some of these co-benefits in greater depth:

Carbon Reduction

Firstly, our process intercepts carbon captured by growing plants and sequesters the carbon into recalcitrant solid forms, such as biochar-based fertilizer, where such carbon can be removed into the soil for hundreds of years. At scale, Takachar can remove more than a gigatonne of CO2-equivalent per year. Furthermore, we enable lower energy and carbon consumption. As mentioned previously, currently chemical manufacturing (e.g. fertilizers) often require a high-temperature, energy-intensive, production process. By harnessing the intrinsic heating value of biomass residues (most of which would otherwise be burned without energy benefit), we eliminate most of this energy-intensive process. This can avoid another gigatonne of CO2e per year.

Farm Yield Improvement

Farmers are diverse, but take the example of Mr. Kibuchi, a rice farmer we work in Kenya through our local partner Safi Organics. He has been testing our fertilizer instead, and noticed that for the same price that he pays, he is getting around 25% more in harvest yield. 

Some of the more qualitative testaments of our impact given by local farmers are as follows:

• “After switching to the Safi Sarvi® fertilizer, I never have to worry putting enough food on the table for my family. What’s more, I sell the excess rice and use the income to send my children to school.” 
• “My land was producing less than 10 bags due to acidity problems. After using Safi Sarvi® I have doubled production in 2 seasons.” 
•  “If they have not started using it, they should start now.”  

Rural Livelihood Creation

Our biomass processing systems can support new profitable village-based fertilizer production in rural communities. Another group of beneficiaries are our partnering local agricultural organizations and entrepreneurs who operate and profit from our systems, as well as the additional rural youths they employ to support the localized production. Take the example of Mr. Japheth. He graduated from high school, and had difficulty finding a job in his ancestral village. He was about to move to a slum in Nairobi to find an urban job. Then he heard about our pilot localized operation, and became a production associate. He was able to stay in his home village, and three years later, was promoted to production foreman. 

As of now, we have achieved a scale of 11,000 tons of crop residues managed (UN SDG target 12.5), where we have created $330,000 in additional jobs/economic activities in rural communities.

Other Long-Term Benefits

As we expand our operation beyond the agricultural context into the processing of non-merchantable forest residues in Mediterranean climates such as the West Coast, we also expect to have lasting impact on the local rural communities. These are enumerated below using California as a case study. 

Firstly, the local rate-payers will see greater reliability. Recently, the increased incidence of wildfires has caused electrical utilities to preventively shut off certain electrical assets, resulting in rolling blackouts. By creating a more effective way to valourize high-hazard, flammable woody biomass residues into higher-value bioproduct, we enable electrical utilities to manage a larger area of their vegetation more effectively with lower costs.