The Village Hub

We thought you might find this invention as interesting and inspiring as we did. The "Village Hub" is a mini factory that can completely change the well-being of local villages in Indonesia. It is all based on the sugar palm. First, villagers tap the juice from a living palm tree, just like getting maple syrup from a maple tree. So it doesn't kill the tree. The sugar palms are growing in a biodiverse forest rather than on a monoculture farm. The trees don't need any fertilizer.

The juice is brought to the Village Hub, which is a system of interconnected small facilities in one central location. The Village Hub turns the juice into two products: ethanol to use locally as fuel, and syrup to sell.

Many of these rural areas often experience fuel supply difficulties, so this ethanol production is important. They also use the ethanol for bright light (using a Coleman-lantern-like lamp) and for clean cooking fuel.

Fermentation of ethanol produces carbon dioxide, which is captured in the Village Hub and fed into an algae pond (when carbon dioxide is added to algae, it grows a lot faster). The algae is then harvested and used as a high-protein feed for cattle and goats.

The manure from the animals goes into a small biogas installation, which produces methane that they use as fuel to create heat for the ethanol distillation. The leftover from the biogas installation is used as fertilizer to grow crops.

The other product the Village Hub produces is palm syrup. The palm juice is heated to evaporate some of the water, and that steam is used to preheat the juice before it goes into the evaporator (making the process use less overall fuel) and the contact between the steam and the cool juice produces condensation, which is collected and made available as clean drinking water.

The whole Village Hub unit is compact and transportable, and could change the lives of millions of Indonesians. Everyone involved with the Village Hub earns more money, so they can afford to send their children to school.

If you'd like to see a Village Hub in action, watch this YouTube video: Village Hub.

Read more about it: The Value of Sugar Palm in Indonesia.

Adam Khan is the co-author with Klassy Evans of Fill Your Tank With Freedom and the author of Slotralogy and Self-Reliance, Translated. Follow his podcast, The Adam Bomb.