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What is Prota™Culture?  Back in Belgium in the year 1986, Paul Olivier had developed a dense medium drum to sort a variety of root vegetables such as potatoes and carrots. This separator proved to be so accurate, that a huge opportunity appeared in 1990 to separate and recycle automobile and industrial waste. This carrot separator on waste materials had, indeed, found its true home, and it completely transformed the waste recycling industry in Europe. The next step was to apply this technology to residential waste free of food waste. In 1995 several trials were conducted on 30,000 tons of MSW, and once again, the results were amazing. A trash bin free of food waste separated with roughly the same ease and accuracy as an automobile, a refrigerator or an old computer. But what then does one do with source-separated food waste? During that same year, while visiting his sister in Louisiana, Paul told her that he was looking for a creature that could eat and recycle food waste. She then showed him the compost bin in her back yard, and there he saw thousands of grubs, some as long as an inch, eating food waste and reducing it to almost nothing within a period of just a few hours. Immediately he went to a local grocery store and bought some fresh vegetables. He threw them in his sister's compost bin, and when he saw these grubs devour a raw Irish potato in less than six hours, he knew that he had found everything that I was looking for. But he had no idea what this creature could be. He collected a few grubs and brought them to an entomologist in Belgium who identified them to be the larvae of the black soldier fly. A quick search on the Internet brought up the name of Dr. Craig Sheppard, who, at that time, had already devoted over 15 years of research to this insect. A year later Paul visited Dr. Sheppard who explained in detail the amazing life cycle of the black soldier fly.When Paul understood the migratory instinct of mature pre-pupae, he then set about designing several types of bins to assist them in their migratory effort. Most bins that he had designed were too bulky, too complicated, too costly and oftentimes, or too messy to warrant mass production. However, while traveling in Vietnam in the year 2000, Paul met the famous entomologist, Dr. Tran Tan Viet. Paul asked Dr. Viet to experiment with a newly patented vessel that Paul had devised to coax migrating larvae to self-harvest into a collection bucket. When Paul saw that the larvae were able to exit this simple device within a matter of minutes, he commissioned a roto-molding factory in Saigon to make 12 prototypes that he shipped to Louisiana and tested there for over three years. During this time in Louisiana Paul experimented with just about every type of putrescent waste imaginable: cow waste, swine waste, rabbit waste, horse waste, chicken waste, slaughter house waste, vegetable waste and, of course, food waste from his own table and from local restaurants. The larvae easily digested and recycled of all of these problematic waste materials.In 2006 he moved to Vietnam so that he could be close to the factory that had made the prototypes, and in 2007, with the help of Karl Warkomski and Paul's son, Robert, many new features were added to the device that eventually bore the name of Biopod. |
