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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
This paper describes the journey of a multinational and
multidisciplinary team enrolled in the European Project Semester
(EPS) at the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP)
during the spring semester of 2019. The team embraced the idea of
repurposing coffee leftovers to cultivate oyster mushrooms and
benefited from the background diversity of the team members as
well as from newly acquired marketing, sustainability and design
ethics skills to consolidate and strengthen the overall feasibility of
the project. The project was set to design, develop and test grey
oyster mushroom growth kits with an automated monitoring
system, using coffee grounds as growing substrate and complying
with the applicable regulations and pre-defined requirements. The
ulterior aims of the project were to reconnect people with the food
they eat and to disseminate sustainable food production processes,
which are not only healthy but environmentally friendly. To
achieve these goals, the team developed a circular economy
business model where grey oyster mushroom growth kits reuse
coffee grounds as growing beds and food buckets as containers.
The designed growth kits include a controlled fruiting chamber
with an integrated monitoring system. This allows easy domestic
cultivation, monitoring through a smart phone. Moreover, the
proposed solution contemplates information sharing on the
mushroom cultivation process, monitoring system and recipes as
well as the maintenance of a dedicated discussion forum. Tests
have been conducted to test the concept, cultivation process,
monitoring system and fruiting chamber from the incubation of
mycelium all the way to the harvesting. Results show the feasibility
of creating a business based on the devised concept
Description
Keywords
Circular Economy Education for Sustainability Engineering Capstone Project European Project Semester Project-based Learning
