VEssOiL

Essential oils are our everyday life and we are happy to see that it is yours too. However, in order to produce the essential oils that you love so much, as well as the rest of our products, we inevitably create unwanted waste. This waste mostly includes the herbs that give you your favorite products, essential oils, macerated oil and hydrolats. Nonetheless, this waste needs to be managed and it takes time, money and effort. 

Thus, we thought that we should look closer into our waste, and, see whether there are any hidden gems in our herbs that cannot be extracted by our distillation or maceration process. To this end, we are collaborating with a special team from the Laboratory of Particles and Aerosols Technology of the Cenre of Research and Thechnology in Thessaloniki, that will process our waste samples in order to create products with added value. Through Hydrothermal Liquefaction (HTL), they will seperate our waste into their components of hydrocarbons, water and inorganic elements. The technology creates a solid, a liquid and an aerial phase, that each one of them can contain useful components for further study or even act as raw materials in the creation of new products. Superfoods? Fuels? Soil fertilizers? We will know by the end of this project that is funded by the National Strategic Reference Framework 2014–2020 and the Region of Central Macedonia.