For this Fudan professor, food waste is pollution too
Print Edition
FOR most people, smoking and exhaust emissions are closely linked to air pollution. Professor Marie Kieran Harder wants to add food waste into that category as well.
Shanghai has been putting a lot of effort in asking residents to sort out the food waste. Many other cities in the world have tried to do the same but haven’t been successful, according to Harder.
The British professor, 53, who was awarded this year’s Magnolia Silver Award by the Shanghai Municipal Government, insisted that all discoveries and research should be for social benefits.
Harder and her husband, biologist David Waxman, came to Shanghai in 2011 to work at Fudan University. They were hired as part of China’s “Thousand Talents Program.”
Having done her PhD in Nuclear Structure Physics from the University of Sussex, Harder was teaching for more than 20 years at the Brighton University, where she set up the Brighton Environmental Body.
The professor’s current studies can be roughly divided into following topics — waste stream flows, household waste, public education on waste awareness, materials recovery of end-of-life vehicles, pyrolysis of shredder residues, and related metal contaminations.
The inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary work that she enjoys — which others find it difficult to grasp — has a modern name: sustainable development.
“If a city is producing a lot of food waste, why not use them to produce energy? Chinese rural areas and farms have been doing that for years, but big cities have not promoted it as yet,” Harder says.
Harder’s team at Fudan is working with an NGO that is cooperating with district governments to educate the residents on sorting food waste.
“Telling the residents to sort the food waste is just the first step; it’s a difficult task,” says Harder.
Direct communication with the residents is another approach taken up by Harder and her team. And the success rate has been amazing. In some local communities, 80 percent of the food waste is separated, according to a study conducted by Harder’s team.
Her students collect the data by visiting communities, talking to cleaners and residents as well.
The British scholar says Shanghai should be proud of this achievement.
“About 10-20 percent of the residents complete the sorting process by themselves, which is an incredible achievement,” according to Harder.
She hopes to pursue it on a bigger scale. “The question is how to make it bigger. One NGO is far from enough.”
In the future, Harder plans to publish a handbook for communities on how they can help and contribute to make the environment better.
Harder’s office is in the Department of Environmental Science & Engineering, where she focuses on applications of sustainable development in science (social and physical), education, business and civil society.
“Food waste sorting is not science; most problems in society do not belong to science,” she says. “Maybe in another five years the work I do will not fit any subjects.”
Harder has been involved in more than 64 publications and has supervised 26 PhD students, including three at Fudan.
One of Harder’s plans here is to form a study team, a “network” that can combine various subjects.
She has been recommending foreign institutes and foundations to her faculty members and lecturers for various study and research programs abroad.
She has also strived to get overseas funding for projects at Fudan. According to a booklet released by the university, Harder has helped in raising funds worth 2.7 million pounds (US$3.37 million) over the past few years.
Harder, meanwhile, is enjoying her time in the city. Having never been on the Chinese mainland before 2011, Harder says it was easy to move in to the city.
“The beautiful campus and the city outside the university made me decide to come here. I really enjoy the happy life here.”
The professor follows a low-carbon lifestyle of her own. She lives in a small apartment with her husband and rides a bike everywhere.
Although she misses the blue skies sometimes, she still retains a positive attitude to Shanghai’s traffic situation.
“The government is doing a pretty good job,” she says.
She frowns at the sight of big cars like SUVs that reflects social status.
“Many people buy them to show they are rich and successful, but I can only say they are ‘stupid’,” Harder says. “People should not celebrate their wealth or success by polluting the environment for their own families or neighbors.”
For Harder, “China is the future of the world, even though Chinese people may not realize this yet.
“The government is thinking how to modernize,” she says. “Don’t be in a hurry to copy the West. Think of a balance between China and the West and the rest of the world will follow. To be the leader, not copying.”
As an educator, working with her team and learning new teaching experience thrills her the most. She uses descriptions like “very hard-working” and “good at handling a lot of information” to describe her students here.
“Chinese students are said to be good at memorizing and examinations, but they are limited skills as we have the Internet now,” she points out.
Beyond the problem of “creativity” which people think that most Chinese students lack, Harder says there is another problem that is more fundamental than “creativity” — the education system.
“If you are a creative person, you can always develop new things, but the education system here in China will put you into a single subject — you are doing either chemistry or physics or sociology or arts; you cannot do a ‘mixture’.”
The “mixture” can be found in Harder’s study as well.
“My specialty has been physical sciences and waste management, but I have demonstrated that I deal with waste issues in full environmental, social and financial contexts — this approach then qualifies as applied sustainable development. This does not mean that I work on ‘everything;’ it means that I take wider, real-life, issues into account when I work on ‘anything,’” she states.
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