23/05/2011 (The Star) - Rising de-mand for oil palm fibre in China should spur millers in Sabah to look at using their own waste products to generate money, said state Industrial Development Datuk Raymond Tan.

“The market is there. The prices are good and the technology is not expensive,” he said after returning from a visit to an oil palm mill in Bidor, Perak, where fibre from empty fruit bunches were exported to mattress factories in China or turned into briquette.

Tan, who is also the chairman of the state-owned POIC Sabah Sdn Bhd which is developing the Lahad Datu palm oil industrial cluster, said the company was discussing with Global Green Synergy Sdn Bhd to develop a proposed biomass cluster there.

Global Green, Malaysia's major exporter of oil palm fibre, has at its Bidor facility a composting plant, a plant generating electricity from trapping the affluent methane gas and another making bio-briquette by mixing palm fibre and kernel shells.

Tan said the discussion with Global Green also involved encouraging the 120 oil palm mills in the state to adopt the waste-to-wealth principle for its residue.

“The take-off of biomass pro-cessing industries in Sabah has been hampered by supply and price uncertainty of raw materials such as empty fruit bunches,” he said.