But olive oil mills also produce an environmental headache in the form of gummy wastewater that would wreak havoc in a treatment plant were it poured down the sewer.

Olives naturally bear chemicals that stymie anaerobic digestion, the biological process by which dirty water is cost-effectively cleaned.

Last year, a group of University of Utah students - in partnership with students from the Palestinian territories - proposed a way to extract these chemicals as part of an international engineering project. Their achievement recently won the Mondialogo Engineering Award. The prize means their project was one of 10 selected in a United Nations program to promote cross-cultural dialogue.

The prize money, worth nearly $30,000, will go toward implementing a pilot project in the territories this year.

"The state of art is to dump wastewater onto the ground," said Eric Mortenson, a U. chemical engineering major who co-led the project with Awad Nasser, a civil engineer at Birzeit University in the Palestinian territories. "It's a problem that contaminates the groundwater, so it's a big deal there."

The other U. students sharing in the award are Christopher Fox, Madhuvanthi Kandadai, Marisa Brailsford and Samuel Grenlie.

For every ton of produced oil, olive presses generate 264 gallons of a dark viscous fluid that is often dumped without regard to environmental impact, according to Nasser's online statement soliciting help on the project.

In a single olive-growing region, the Ramallah District, 65 mills spew nearly 2 million gallons of wastewater a year. Every fall at the height of the olive harvest, mill discharge sometimes pools into stinking ponds, so operators are encouraged to spread it around on uncultivated agricultural lands.

The offending substances in olives, such as squalene, have value to the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries, so Mortenson's group proposed removing them in a marketable form. If successful, the project would not only enable olive press operators to dispose of wastewater in an economically and environmentally sustainable way, but also achieve another revenue stream from the recovered chemicals, chiefly useful phenol compounds, such as tocopherol and hydroxytyrosol, a powerful antioxidant. Squalene is used in moisturizing lotions.

"You take them out and sell them," Mortenson said. "Some of the estimates are for ridiculous amounts of money. It will infuse economic vitality into that poor region."

In more industrially advanced areas with an olive industry, oil milling is done in a two-phase process that avoids massive discharges of wastewater, producing a slurry known as pomace, according to Dan Flynn, of University of California-Davis's new Olive Center. Without investment capital to upgrade its mills, the Holy Land's olive oil industry is wedded to the traditional three-phase process, which results in piles of solid waste called jifet and streams of contaminated water.

"Some nations burn the jifet as a fuel, but it has a lot of emissions," Flynn said. "There have been uses identified for that water, such as spraying as an herbicide, but you don't want to do it in too high of a concentration; otherwise you'll affect the fertility of the soil."

Olive oil is the Palestinian territories' main agricultural enterprise. About 45 percent of the occupied West Bank's agricultural lands are covered in olive orchards. In addition to setting the scene for dozens of biblical stories, the territories are where olive husbandry began and some of its groves date back to when Jesus walked these arid hills. About 90 percent of the region's 10 million trees are pressed into oil. This totals about 16,000 tons a year, half of which are exported, according to production figures compiled by the International Olive Council.

bmaffly@sltrib.com