Workers bag rice hull from a heap near the national highway in the Science City of Muñoz to sell to cement factories.
Photo by Elmo Roque
SCIENCE CITY OF MUÑOZ – “Ipa,” or the husk of the palay, which used to be the most unwanted by-product of the cereal, is now a pricey commodity. It used to be a bane for rice millers as its proper disposal was a big problem.
Big rice millers even devoted some hectares of lands for the dumping of this agricultural waste. Others dump it elsewhere, including roadsides where it is burned and becomes a nuisance for motorists and travelers because of the thick smoke emanating from the burning heap.
Experts said about 20 percent of the palay grains become rice hull in the de-hulling operation of the rice mills.
Computations by rice experts indicated that for the 14 million metric tons of palay milled in the country every year, the rice hull is about 3.1 million metric tons. But the low regard for the “ipa” has changed. It is now a pricey commodity because of new-found uses for it in the cement industry, for conversion into carbonized rice hull, and now as a biomass for commercial operation of rice hull-powered electric plant.
“It is now priced at P0.80 to P1 a kilogram,” Edgardo Alfonso, president of the San Jose City Rice Millers Association, said. “It is bought by cement factories which use it to power their plants instead of using coal’, he added.
Alfonso, who is the chief operating officer of the San Jose City I-Power Corporation, said their corporation will be buying soon rice hull at P1 a kilogram from the 26 rice millers in San Jose City once their rice hull powered electric plant starts operating.
“We will be using 100,000 to 120,000 metric tons of rice hull for our plant every year. It is about 70 percent of the volume produced in our city yearly,” Alfonso said. Another rice hull-powered generating plant, with a capacity of 12 megawatts, is currently being constructed in Talavera, Nueva Ecija.
The plant will be using the rice hull produced by the biggest rice mill in Nueva Ecija based in that town. Affected by the newfound importance of rice hull are the farmers who operate the government- distributed flatbed drying facility which uses rice hull to power its machine.
“I buy the rice hull now for P2,000 per Elf truck load or P5,000 per ten-wheeler truck load,” said Willy Bernardo in the Science City of Muñoz who operates a flatbed drying facility. “At times, I have to wait for days (to procure the rice hull) because the millers sell it to cement factories,” he added.
He recalled that rice millers before even paid land owners for the truckloads of rice hull dumped on their lands. Also affected by the unexpected value-adding to the rice hull were those engaged in the production of carbonized rice hull (CHR).
Promoted by the Philippine Rice Institute (PhilRice), the CHR, or the partially burned rice hull produced through an open-type carbonizer, is used as substrate to organic fertilizer, soil conditioner or ameliorant, water purifier, filter or absorbent, base material for making microbial inoculants, charcoal, odor suppressant and others.
PhilRice reported that one association, the Organic Farmers Unit Association, Inc. in Balbalungao, Pangasinan, was the first to cash in on the production of CHR by exporting it to Japan. Five other people’s organization, it said, also made big money for the production of CHR in collaboration with PhilRice, Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement (PRRM), and a corporation which is exporting volumes of CHR to other countries.
But even if rice hull has become a pricey commodity now, Phil- Rice, through its bulletin, is continuing with the promotion of the production of CHR because of its many important uses. The agency indicated that for a nine-ton rice hull main material, the CHR producers can still earn a gross income of P45,000 and a net of P31,461.11.
The only problem that they will encounter, it appeared, is that they will compete with the middlemen in getting volumes of this important and pricey commodity now.
