Researching sustainable waste treatments and entrepreneurship

CSUB professors awarded USDA grant for collaborative study with UC Riverside

By California State University, Bakersfield

September 29^th, 2021

Three professors at California State University, Bakersfield have been awarded nearly $300,000 from the United States Department of Agriculture for a collaborative project they are working on along with faculty from the University of California, Riverside.

CSUB engineering professors Drs. Zhongzhe Liu and Luis Cabrales, both from the School of Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Engineering, will join forces with Dr. Jeremy Woods, from CSUB’s School of Business and Public Administration, for a project on sustainable waste treatment. While Drs. Liu and Cabrales’ work focuses on researching energy and resource recovery from agriculture-derived waste streams, Dr. Woods will focus on outreach to the region’s agriculture communities and entrepreneurship training.

“This collaborative project is aimed to build the capacity for students in investigating sustainable waste treatment methods and to develop sustainable entrepreneurship and leadership to address the challenges of handling agriculture-derived wastes in the nation’s leading agriculture region, California’s Central Valley,” Dr. Liu said.

Researching sustainable waste treatments and entrepreneurship

Dr. Liu’s research is focused on energy recovery to assess an advanced thermochemical conversion technology that simultaneously treats dairy wastewater and crop residues. This technology will ultimately turn waste stream mixture to renewable energy, such as synthetic natural gas. From there, a UC Riverside team led by Dr. Chan Seung Park will take the experimental data resulting from Dr. Liu’s research to model the waste-to-energy process and assess its feasibility.

Dr. Cabrales will focus on resource recovery to characterize the physical properties of pistachio shells that are important to the fabrication of composite materials and determine the optimal treatment method. Dr. Cabrales explained that in recent years, there has been an increased commercial interest in producing materials from renewable resources.

“The utilization of materials derived from a renewable resource could help reduce our carbon footprint, and some of them present good biodegradability,” Dr. Cabrales said. “Several companies are heavily investing in the commercialization of bioderived materials. The research project involves the use of pistachio shells to produce materials with enhanced mechanical properties. By creating composite materials from pistachio shells, there will be a reduction of waste heading toward landfills.”

On the entrepreneurship side, Dr. Woods’ work includes three initiatives. The first is to create sustainable entrepreneurship training, classes that focus on key messaging, motivation, value capture and capital acquisition tactics unique to sustainable entrepreneurship. The second, internship generation, will help industry partners identify related needs that can be addressed by the university’s engineering and business students.

The final initiative centers around building at least two new startups with the intern teams: one to commercialize the renewable energy potential of agricultural waste streams and the other to commercialize the use of pistachio shell flour in composite materials manufacturing for the aerospace sector.

“The Entrepreneurship Program is excited to work together with our colleagues from NSME, as well as with various partners in the community, to deliver innovative sustainable entrepreneurship training to our engineering students, develop student internship opportunities with local agriculture, energy and aerospace companies, and build new startups to explore the commercial potential of local agricultural wastes,” Dr. Woods said.

In all, the grant will create a postdoctoral research position and 30 paid student research assistant positions, develop 50 service-learning internships, build two new start-up ventures and deliver related classes and workshops to more than 470 students.

The grant is from the USDA Capacity Building Grants for Non-Land Grant Colleges of Agriculture Program (NLGCA) and is part of a total $7 million that the USDA is investing in 24 programs nationwide for research, education and outreach related to food, agriculture, natural resources and human sciences.

“Simply speaking, we are glad to collaborate with the UC system,” Dr. Liu said. “Also, we are happy that the project can improve the capability of both CSUB and UCR students via experiential learning, education, outreaching and extension.”

In Kern County, the real-world implications of the research could be huge.

“The Central Valley is a top producer of agricultural products in the U.S. and is home to the largest concentration of dairies in California,” Dr. Liu said. “Accordingly, the Central Valley has the highest concentration of agriculture-derived wastes such as dairy wastewater and crop residues. This project will investigate sustainable waste treatment methods and develop sustainable entrepreneurship and leadership to address the challenges of handling agriculture-derived waste streams in the Valley.”