Four research projects from SLU on the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences’ (IVA) 100 List for sustainable crisis preparedness
The Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences is now presenting this year's 100 List. The selected research projects from Swedish universities and institutes of higher education are all considered to have great potential for bringing actual benefit. The emphasis is on preparedness for crises and society's ability to deal with them. Four of the 51 research projects are from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.
Urine-based manure
The research team behind the project Urine-based Manure are active in the Department of Energy and Technology.
Björn Vinnerås, Jenna Senecal and Prithvi Simha have developed a method of sorting urine at source and drying it. By separating the water off from the urine, plant-nutrient emissions into sewers can be reduced by 80%, whilst a safe manure is produced.
"It’s great that the IVA has recognised our research project. We’ve seen that our system can make a big contribution towards reducing emissions into sewers. We’ve finally taken the step from laboratory to implementation, having just over a year ago installed a system in a toilet in the department. We’re now about to install a system at the wastewater organisation VA SYD’s head office in Malmö, and during the summer we’ll be installing several systems in public toilets in Visby. It is our hope that urine drying will be the future choice for urine management within our society," says Björn Vinnerås.
Jenna Senecal, Björn Vinnerås and Prithvi Simha. Photo: Melissa Barton.
Vertisà
Maria Rosario Garcia-Gil is carrying out research in the Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology. She has made it onto the list with the Vertisà project, whereby she has developed a vertically integrated cultivation and irrigation system that releases water in accordance with the needs of each individual plant. See her project pitch via this link.
Maria Rosario Garcia-Gil. Photo: UPSC
Food at Home
Vertical farming is also being used within the Food at Home project. A complete indoor cultivation facility has been developed for this by the former SLU researcher Sarosh Ramachandra and the former student Staffan Matzén. A bigger production facility has been created on SLU's Kungsängen premises in Uppsala, where herbs are grown; they are then sold to wholesalers and local food shops under the Deliplant brand.
Sarosh Ramachandra. Photo: Patrik Söderman.
Hållbar svampodling till dubbla produkter
Shaojun Xiong's project Sustainable Mushroom Cultivation for Dual Products combines cost-effective cultivation of shiitake and oyster mushrooms with production of bioethanol. A patented process of resource-efficient cultivation in residual products from Swedish forestry has been developed. During cultivation the fungal mycelium breaks down lignin in the wood and releases cellulose, facilitating bioconversion to ethanol of the culture medium used. Shaojun is a researcher in the Department of Forest Biomaterials and Technology.
Shaojun Xiong. Photo: BioInnovation
The choice of theme for this year’s 100 List is a direct consequence of the coronavirus pandemic
Many of the challenges brought by the pandemic are linked to emergency preparedness and the capacity to manage crises. But the research featured on this year’s 100 List is not limited to pandemics, it also addresses other crises that sweep through society such as wars/geopolitical conflicts, natural disasters, financial crises, cyberattacks, or shortages of water, energy, raw materials, components and talent.
The 51 research products on IVA’s 100 List 2021 have been selected because they create value for companies or societies in the form of knowledge, processes, products or business development. The research can be applied in one of the following areas:
- Smart industry
- Circular economy
- Society and prosperity
- Infrastructure
- Business models
- Green industries
About the 100 List
The 100 List is developed by the IVA project Research2Business, R2B, which seeks to make Sweden a leader in the conversion of academic research in the technical and economic sciences into innovation and competitiveness in industry and commerce. IVA's 100 List was launched in conjunction with IVA's 100th anniversary in 2019, hence the name. The project is run in collaboration with the Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems (Vinnova), the Swedish Intellectual Property Office (PRV), the Association of Swedish Engineering Companies (Teknikföretagen), the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise (Svenskt Näringsliv), the Knowledge Foundation (KK-stiftelsen), the venture-capital company Almi and Sweden's universities and institutes of higher education.
Read more about the list here (in Swedish).
