Three students at Al Raafah Secondary School in the Emirate of Umm Al Quwain: Mitref Hamdan, Sultan Al Ali and Ali Bin Hamdah have devised a way to exploit a wild shrub spread in the local environment to produce cork, pure charcoal, and polymer for the textile industry.

The school's chemistry teacher, Ikrami Mustafa, told Emirates Today that the project is based on a wild shrub that is ubiquitous, has high resistance to drought, grows at worst without water, does not need care, and is characterized by its economic return. Hence, the project will serve sustainable development.

He stressed that the innovation is new of its kind, where there is not enough information about the shrub except its name and length, and places of availability, and tolerance to the harsh conditions of water scarcity and type of soil, pointing out that the shrub did not receive attention from the inhabitants of the environments in which they grow, believing that it is a poisonous shrub.

Mustafa cited several benefits for growing this shrub: increasing the cultivated area with useful plants, preventing desertification, producing renewable fuels, cultivating wild plants effortlessly, producing coal without pollution, and producing polymer with multiple applications, including the fabric industry.

He identified five tools used to extract cork, polymer and charcoal from a shrub, a small mill, and some low-cost chemicals, to blend with powder to increase the hardness of the resulting coal, a press piston to produce pressurized charcoal and rubber, an environmentally friendly indirect combustion oven, and a polymer converting machine. .

Mustafa explained the method of conducting experiments on the shrub, starting with bringing stems, roots and fruits of the desert shrub, and then put each group of these components in a drying section, followed by the step of charring the stems and roots, and to detect the percentage of pollution resulting from combustion, as well as the analysis of ash in collaboration with a company to analyze Materials show that the percentage of oxides in charcoal produced from shrub stems is approximately 0%.

“We tested the polymer from the shrub in collaboration with a material analysis company in Dubai, and we were able to produce a type of silk and cotton cloth used to prevent water absorption.