The
first stop of the traveling university posed a real challenge for the
participating 20 students: greening one
of Sri Lanka´s greenest enterprises. The well-known producer of virgin
coconut oil, Serendipol Ltd, inter alia operates a seasoned corporate social
responsibility program ensuring and promoting their organic supply and
production scheme. Consequently, the company has been awarded organic and fair
trade labels and serves some of the most aware consumer markets such as Germany
and the United States.
Therefore,
the challenge of finding optimisation potentials, technical designs and
financially evaluating them had not been an easy task to be completed within just
a day. But as the travelling university aims to ‘bring out the students’
creativity to optimise the business competiveness of Sri Lankan SMEs’ the
students started meticulously analysing the company’s current production
process and their outreach into the regional communities to detect efficiency
potentials and new business opportunities. By applying different
value-chain-mapping technics and material flow analysis tools the “student
consultants” finally were able to successfully outline a number of interesting
ideas.
The
simple approach to make the already green and sustainable company more sustainable
and greener example was to look into the opportunities of creating a “Zero
Emission” company. Hence, the entire energy demand was analysed to postulate
several electrical energy efficiency projects reducing the overall electricity demand
that should finally be covered by a new roof mounted photovoltaic system. The
thermal energy demand of the facility is already covered using the residues of process,
namely coconut shells which are crushed and used in a biomass boiler. Despite
that being a Zero Emission measure, the students found that the coconut shells
are too valuable to be used as fuel wood only. Therefore, a concept of
producing activated carbon by employing German Zero Emission pyrolysis
technology was evaluated and alternative local biomass creating additional
value for their local coconut growers was proposed. The final idea to round up this very
ambitious and far-reaching concept had been the Zero Wastewater Discharge
approach although the existing wastewater treatment is fulfilling the requested
threshold limits. The new idea of a constructed wetland using indigenous plants
to purify wastewater and produce biomass does not only comply with water
treatment requirements but integrates perfectly into the landscape and reduces
the energy demand of the treatment process significantly while providing water
suitable for irrigation purpose.
Members
of the top-management of Serendipol and the student supervisors of the five
national universities were pleased with the performance of the “student
consultancy team” and discussed further industrial – university cooperation
possibilities in the field of recruitment and research.
Hats
off to the students for their successful performance at one of the greenest
companies in Sri Lanka. One completed, next challenges up ahead. The Traveling
University is on the road for 10 days visiting 5 companies in Kuliyapitiya,
Maradankadawala, Trincomalee, and Jaffna.
The ‘Traveling University’ (TU) is a
signature seminar course of the International Material Flow Management (IMAT)
master degree program offered by the Institute for Applied Material Flow
Management (IfaS). ‘Higher
education for sustainable development’ being the
motto of TU, in this interdisciplinary
seminar course, IfaS
aims to deploy its expertise in tangible projects world over whilst giving the
students the opportunity to put their acquired knowledge into practice in real
time.
0 comments:
Post a Comment