Brazil
Essential Oil Distillation for Boa Vista do Acará
- Student Papers
Boa Vista do Acará is a small agricultural community in Northern Brazil that consistently faces financial instability. This interferes with their access to basic social services such as healthcare and education. Currently, Boa Vista harvests 50 tons of herbs per year, however, rather than distilling essential oil themselves, they sell their herbs as wholesale raw material to the Natura company. If Natura were to ever pull out of their contract, Boa Vista would be in a financial crisis. Therefore the ability to distill essential oils independently would allow Boa Vista Do Acará residents to stabilize their income source. Currently, our team is partnering with with the Association of Organic Farmers of Boa Vista do Acará (APOBV) to build an oil distillation device specifically to suit the needs of this community.
Essential Oil Distillation for Boa Vista do Acará
- Student Papers
A team of students from UC Davis D-Lab partnered with the Association of Organic Farmers of Boa Vista do Acará (APOBV) to build an oil distillation device as a follow-up to IDDS Amazon in 2016. They designed an oil distiller that can be built with local tools and materials, operate in humid conditions with fire as the primary energy source and produce oil at high quality in a high quantity to sell to tourists in local markets. This report chronicles the development and testing of this device.