How can I reuse or recycle olive stones?
Harking back to the original inspiration for the whole of Recycle This (pistachio nut shells), I’ve been wondering about olive stones recently.
Olive pits aren’t as big or pretty as other fruit stones but my, we “generate” a lot of them. Given we live in the windswept north of England, we’re probably not going to have a lot of success growing them into trees – and even if we did, if we try to sprout them from every stone we de-fleshed, we’d be quickly overrun!
So what else can we do with them? As with pistachio nut shells, it seems a waste to just compost them.
Googling around, I’ve seen some suggestions of using them for fuel – anyone know anything about that? Do any companies that pit them pre-sale do anything like that?
I also have half of memory of being able to grind them up and use them in homemade exfoliators like ground walnut shells – I don’t know how hard they are to grind up though…
Any other ideas?
Really, people. This is a non-problem.
I do know that you can use cherry stones in bags that are then heated up in the microwave (like wheat bags but with cleaned cherry stones) so maybe they could be used for a similar purpose. You would maybe have to do a few test runs though first to ensure it works and to make sure they were super clean!!
I eat ridiculous amounts of olives, but I always buy pitted ones because I can’t be bothered to chew around the stones.
That does of course mean that I’m still causing thousands of stones to pile up somewhere else, but I wonder what the factories that pit the olives do with the stones? Maybe they’re ground up to use in things like natural exfoliant products?
I figured out how to clean them really well. (seeds in general in fact dattes, cherries…). Let them soak for a few weeks in a bassin of water. All the food left onthe seed will roat and seperate and come to the surface. The seeds will float to the bottom and will be perfectly clean.
Apparently they can be fed to chickens – probably best to smash them up first though.
Chuck them on the fire or wood burning stove. Excellent source of energy and you can scatter the ash on the garden for a double dose of recycling.