Composting Goldtree
2019
Sierra Leone
The palm oil industry is very controversial because of its impact on the environment. The company Goldtree, located in Sierra Leone, processes both fruits from local farmers and from their own plantation to process them into crude palm oil. In this way, the company ensures a revival of the local economy and higher job security for the inhabitants of the immediate area. In this way, the region can revive after the severe civil war and the Ebola epidemic that had turned the country into a complete mess.
We, Celine and Andreas, will be working at a Goldtree this year to make the production process and processing of this oil as sustainable as possible. We do this in an African way, with a lot of manpower and hardly any machines. When palm oil gets the international sustainability label, more can be sold and the oil gets a higher value. We are trying to find a way to optimize the processing of the waste flows that the company produces. We want to achieve this by composting the waste flow, reusing it in the field in the form of fertigation, and searching for other possibilities for processing these waste flows together with the local population. With fertigation we combine an irrigation system with fertilizing the soil. For this we will be able to use all the knowledge that we gained from our training as bio-engineers at the KULeuven.