Dr Mike Thakoordin Archives

Saica site visit

TransFIRe members paid a visit to Saica Paper this week to find out about their operations and to look for potential collaborative opportunities. Saica are a leading manufacturer of high-performance and 100% recycled papers for corrugated cardboard in Europe and the US. During the visit, Sanjoo Paddea gave a talk on the overall TransFIRe project, Natanael Bolson gave some insights on resource flows for the paper industry, Dr Lampros Litos MIET talked about waste valorisation and Simon Curling talked about his work on coatings for paper packaging with Wipak and re-pulping with Pulpex and others. As part of the presentations, TransFIRe highlighted that best practices in the paper industry could reduce the carbon footprint and energy emissions by up to 50% and we hope to be able to help identify ways in which Saica can move towards this.

Getting out and about

As part of the EDI team’s activities, Mike Thakoordin, TransFIRe Post-doctoral Research Associate at Durham University, undertakes a number of site visits to companies within the foundation industries. This month has been extremely busy with several visits across the country. With each visit, as well as getting to know more about the company and its inputs and outputs, Mike looks to determine the level of awareness of EDI within the organisation, what the main challenges are, if and how they have tackled these, what the outcome of this has been and what the future plans are. Over the past few weeks visits have been made to Tandom, a specialist metals recycling company, Breedon Cement, Almath Crucibles, the Materials Processing Institute (online) and Constellium. Each organisation has its own unique approach to EDI and set of plans, some with little activity and others with some impressive ideas and ways of [...]