Winter 2017 - Boa Vista do Acará, Brazil

Ashley Yamada, B.S. in Biological & Agricultural Engineering, 2017. D-Lab Involvement: Student in the Winter 2017 Global Poverty Seminar 

Thomas Wickett, B.S. in Biological & Agricultural Engineering, 2017

Tara Randall, B.S. in Biological & Agricultural Engineering, 2017

Description

D-Lab and BAE students Ashley Yamada, Tara Randall, and Thomas Wickett were awarded Blum and PIET funding to implement their projects over summer in Brazil. 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. These students partnered with the Association of Organic Farmers of Boa Vista do Acará (APOBV) to build an oil distillation device. Over the course of the school year this team developed a working prototype and extensively researched oil distillation. With this knowledge and experience the team traveled to Brazil to teach the community how to distill and test essential oil and how to build their own distiller.

Read the distiller instructions

Read the final report

Photos