Five of Alfaisal University’s engineering graduates have come up with a way to integrate palm trees — staples outside football stadiums in the Middle East — into the manufacturing of actual arena seats.
Integrating the palm tree fibers into the chairs was a concept that the group came up with for Challenge 22, a regional innovation award from the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy, which oversees the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
The five women from Alfaisal University in Saudi Arabia are finalists in the contest, and now, they have their sights set on designing the seats for the FIFA World Cup.
“In the short term we want to secure the support for patent registration, and in the long run implement the idea and finally conclude the feasibility of its use in projects for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar and other regional projects,” group leader Nourah Alrubaiq said.
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The project was started in 2015. The team, made up of three mechanical engineers and two industrial engineers, worked on some initial studies before beginning to test materials made from the palm tree fibers.
According to Alrubaiq, Saudi Arabia generates 75,000 tons of palm tree waste annually and “the Arab world is home to 70 percent of the world’s 120 million palm trees.”
“That presented a huge opportunity for us to develop a sustainable solution to make the best of the discarded biomass instead of disposing it,” Alrubaiq said.
After getting some positive results from its initial tests, the group submitted its project to the sustainability challenge on Challenge 22. The team has discovered a way to recycle the waste of date palm trees and mix it with recycled polymer (like PVC) to produce recyclable seats. By using just 1-3 percent of the 75,000 tons of Saudi Arabian palm tree waste, upwards of 60,000 seats can be made. Using palm tree waste also drastically reduces the cost of manufacturing the seats.
In the next step of Challenge 22, the group will work with a network of mentors, go through training workshops and develop their proposal.