On Tuesday 23rd of May we will have the last edition of the 2022-2023 cycle of the Curie Colloquium. The invited speaker will be Prof. Anthony Ryan, director founder of the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures.
At Zaatari refugee camp, 80,000 people facing daily struggles that many of us cannot imagine are squeezed into six square kilometres. With high qualified jobs at home, they are forcibly unemployed at the camp but embodying values that are often forgotten by those of us in more privileged parts of the world: an adaptable approach to solving problems, an aversion to waste, a sense of community. Our research on hydroponics is focussed on the production of high-value crops close to market (urban farming) with a low carbon and water footprint using polyurethane foam as a synthetic soil. I will show how a design of experiments approach can predict the productivity of crops from the reagents used in polyurethane synthesis through the properties of the foam. We connected our work on synthetic soils with a waste disposal problem posed by UNHCR –the UN’s refugee agency. Where they saw dirty unused mattresses, we saw an alternative growth substrate. In doing so we developed small-scale hydroponics at the household and community scale. We responded to the frequent cry of the Syrian refugees –that they miss the colour green- not only did we find a technical fix, but also an impact on well being. This benefits our work in Sheffield, we now have an urban farm built using the low-cost technology developed in Zaatari with farmers from Syria.
Ponente del seminario: Anthony J. Ryan OBE
Fecha del seminario: 23/05/2023 12:00
Lugar del seminario: Salón de Actos CSIC - Serrano 117
