A growing appetite for coconut and coconut products has some people wondering whether Australia should be doing more with the popular tropical nut.

Despite having plenty of coconut palms in northern Australia, most coconuts and coconut products sold domestically in supermarkets come from overseas, or are produced from imported raw materials.

But there are more than 11,000 coconut palms in the Douglas Shire — 8,500 of which are on Council land.

Jim Scott is an arborist, based in Port Douglas in far north Queensland, who works on the Douglas Shire Council's coconut palm maintenance program.

In high-traffic areas, coconut palms are regularly de-nutted for safety reasons.

"You've got to climb up the palm, you get tied in, you've got two anchor points — then you remove all the nuts, all the flowers, all the seed pods and the palms should be safe for about six months at that point," Mr Scott said.

Arborists like Jim Scott regularly de-nut the coconut palms for safety reasons. ( ABC News: Courtney Wilson )

A mature coconut palm can produce up to 100 nuts per year — and the work to maintain the trees is physical and constant.

"We want to keep our iconic palms — they're part of our laidback, tropical ambience — but we also want to make sure our visitors and locals are safe and they're not exposed to the risk of a falling coconut," Douglas Shire Council Mayor Julia Leu said.

But is de-nutting the coconut palms wasting a valuable resource? And what happens to the coconuts?

"The bigger coconuts we use — we've got a couple of people we supply them to, they sell them at markets," Mr Scott said.

"For a long time, there have never been any commercial plantations up here.

"There're a lot of smaller sort of plantations, but nothing of a scale big enough to make it commercially viable.

"If someone could rise to the game, there's definitely potential."

Entrepreneurs take and use coconuts from public spaces

There are already entrepreneurial efforts to utilise the tropical bounty.

Casey and Jesse Willetts use coconuts collected from beaches around Port Douglas to make coconut chips.

Casey and Jesse Willets' coconut chip business started out four years ago as a hobby. ( ABC News: Courtney Wilson )

What started out as somewhat of a hobby about four years ago has evolved from occasionally harvesting 20-odd coconuts once a month to a business which now processes about 600 coconuts every ten days.

All of the coconuts are taken from public spaces — which Ms Leu said was "not really a problem".

"People, for years, have taken coconuts — people actually go to the markets with a few coconuts and sell them," she said.

"We've had people make souvenirs, and there are a lot of people who do harvest coconuts and supply them for film sets.

"For example, I know one person recently who supplied coconuts for Pirates of the Caribbean."

'You can never import as fresh as you can produce'

The coco-tap is a tool to help people tap into the nut to drink the water inside. ( ABC News: Courtney Wilson )

Paul Richardson is also passionate about coconuts.

After moving to far north Queensland in his thirties, he became so invested in coconuts, he invented a tool to help people tap into the nut to drink the water inside.

His self-manufactured coco-tap has gone global.

Paul Richardson's self-manufactured coco-tap has gone global. ( ABC News: Courtney Wilson )

"I think it's gone into more than 80 countries and in far flung places, but mainly Florida and Hawaii where the culture is alive and they can afford a decent tool for it," Mr Richardson said.

At his property in Speewah, inland from Cairns, Mr Richardson also propagates dwarf coconut palms and sells them to wholesale nurseries.

"I can, more or less, put drinking machines in people's backyards and sell them a coco-tap much later," he said.

Mr Richardson said northern Australia had the potential to tap into a far greater coconut industry if it was done right.

He said the key was education, so consumers could understand the difference between good and poor quality coconut products.

"It'd be nice to see premium coconut processing here in north Queensland — not to compete with imports, because you can never really import as fresh as you can produce here," he said.

"It's not a bad thing if people have to pay a fair price for something that gets harvested gently rather than an old coconut by-product being re-packaged and re-formulated and called a young coconut.

"That's not the real thing."