Workers putting a trunk into the pulverising machine for it to be processed.

05/12/2014 (The Star) - Malaysia is home to a thriving palm oil industry and we are the second largest palm oil producer in the world

And with some 5.1mil ha of oil palm plantation land in Malaysia, Trunk Busters Sdn Bhd founder and managing director Chandrasekhar Arun noted there was also plenty of oil palm waste to profit from.

Arun explained about 17mil oil palm trees are felled every year for replanting exercises. Most of the tree trunks are chipped into smaller pieces and left to decompose in the plantations as fertiliser while a small percentage is used in the wooden furniture industry.

Trunk Busters provides plantations with the service to pulverise oil palm trunks into mulch, which cuts down on the cost and time of hacking the trunks into smaller pieces and clearing plantation lands.

Arun’s first encounter with an oil palm pulveriser, through a business proposal sent to him, was when he was the head of business development in a listed company.


Oil palm trunks are loaded onto the conveyor before being pulverised.
 
The company rejected the proposal but Arun sought his superior’s permission to pursue the idea as a personal project.

He started working on a prototype in 2005 and got around to testing it the following year.

However, Arun’s mother soon fell ill and he had to abandon the project. He devoted much of his time to caring for his mother and the pulveriser idea was left on the shelf for a few years.

In 2009, he had another go at testing his prototype. As he was still holding a full-time job then, squeezing in time for research and development was no easy task to fully focus on the project.

Two years later, Arun decided to take a leap of faith and left his job to become an entrepreneur.

“I was in my late 40s and I have been working for 30 years. Coming out on my own was a scary decision and it took a lot of strength.

“But thanks to my training in engineering and business development, I was able to evaluate the business proposition that was ahead of me. I knew this was something worth pursuing because the materials are organically available in Malaysia, it is an environmentally-friendly business and is easily scalable,” he said.

Arun continued to build on his prototype and invested heavily into R&D.


Workers finishing a new pulverising machine.
 
He took another two years to built a commercially viable pulveriser. It was a challenging task financially as well as a business prospect.

By the time the machine was ready to be commercialised in July 2013, Arun had already forked out some RM2mil in R&D.

“The thing about making a non-existent product is that it requires a non-existent budget. You need to be brave to spend money even when you don’t know when the spending will end,” he said.

Once he perfected his machine, he worked with various plantation companies and smallholders to demonstrate the use and benefit of the machine for plantation owners.

“We got very good responses from them and it was encouraging. They saw how the machine could pulverise trunks into mulch in a short time and spread the mulch back out onto the fields for fertiliser,” he said.

Last year, Trunk Busters graduated from the first batch of companies to participate in the Coach and Grow program run by Cradle Sdn Bhd.

Trunk Busters got another boost when it received RM600,000 in capital injection from Japanese investors early this year.

Arun had crossed paths with Tomohiro Kamochi to source for equipment parts back in 2010. And late last year, Kamochi expressed interest in taking up a stake in the company.

“After the energy crisis in Fukushima three years ago, the Japanese government encouraged us to move into the biomass market. We found Trunk Busters to be a good proposition,” said Kamochi.

Trunk Busters is expected to complete two new machines over the next eight weeks.

The company is also currently in negotiations to lock down long-term servicing contracts with pellet mills.

Arun explained that only 40% of the biomass is allowed to be taken out of the plantation as it was an important source of nutrient for the palms. The biomass is removed and processed for downstream products such as fuel pellets and bio-based chemicals.

The National Biomass Strategy 2020 estimated that over the next 10 years, approximately 240mil tonnes of trunks will become available during replanting.

The blueprint noted the proposed strategy could potentially add RM30bil in gross national income by 2020.

This value creation is not lost on Trunk Busters.

Along with its Japanese shareholders, Trunk Busters is also looking at moving from just a pulverising service provider to eventually developing its own downstream products from oil palm waste.

Arun said they will further their R&D to look at chemical extraction as well.

“Japan is way ahead of us in renewable energy technology. And having Japanese shareholders is an advantage because we can easily source for parts and materials from Japan and gain from their insights,” he said.

Trunk Busters also hopes to contribute further to the development of downstream processing of oil palm trunks by working with plantation owners, particularly smallholders, to form a more efficient logistics infrastructure to remove biomass.

“In the Japanese way of doing business, we want to grow the business together with our partners,” Kamochi said.