Production Capacity Universities, Institutes & Labs

Alagappa University To Set Up Bioplastic Facility

The Department of Microbiology and Alagappa Institute of Skill Development, in collaboration with Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), South Africa, have initiated a collaborative setup for manufacturing Bioplastics, said N. Rajendran, Vice-Chancellor, Alagappa University.

Addressing a conference on bioplastics here on Tuesday, he said the manufacturing facility had been established at a cost of ₹1.83 crore under RUSA 2.O, a scheme of Ministry of Human Resources and Development.

Pointing that the university had reached a significant place owing to academic excellence at the national level, he asked the faculty members and students to create benchmark in research programmes. “We should compare our work with the work of universities ranking high globally to move forward,” he said.

Stating that the world’s 4% annual production of fossil fuel was used as feedstock for production of plastics, he said this had created energy crisis on the one hand and environmental problems on the other. Bioplastics was one of the possible solutions for those problems, he said.

A. Arun, Associate professor and in charge of Microbiology Department and Kunyu Zhang from Tianjin University in China received a fund of ₹56.57 lakh from MHRD under Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration (SPARC) for production of cost effective modified bioplastics.

The university would be signing MoUs with world-ranking universities, including the Tianjin University, for making further progress, Prof. Rajendran said.

Prof. Kunyu Zhang said there was scope for more cooperation between the two departments and even between the two universities. “Research on bioplastics has broad scope and it will provide employment opportunities to students,” he said. His colleague Dong Po Song invited students, research scholars and science faculty members to Tianjin University to establish research collaboration for the betterment of both the institutions.

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This article was published on http://www.thehindu.com

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