The Morning News ONLINE
EarthCare takes composting operation to Vietnam
Charlie Alison, The Morning News
EarthCare Technologies announced Thursday that the company is taking its
composting technology to
Vietnam.
The project will combine the municipal waste of Hanoi and the
agricultural byproducts of the Daklak
Province in central Vietnam with EarthCare’s composting system.
Officials of Hanoi, Daklak Province,
the University of Arkansas and related companies were on hand to hear
the announcement.
“In Vietnam, they need to have fertilizer,” said Dinh Truang, general
director of EarthCare Vietnam. “But it
needs to be clean fertilizer. They know that compost is good fertilizer
... and are moving away from
chemicals.”
Phil Fredericks, president of EarthCare, said that Vietnam is about to
change its entire agricultural-waste
program to move away from fertilizers that carry hefty environmental
baggage.
He said that EarthCare expects to take about 800 tons of municipal waste
from Hanoi and 300 tons of
agricultural product from Daklak and turn it into organic compost.
“They’re looking at our company to provide that technology, hopefully
throughout the entire country,”
Fredericks said.
He said that he’s already recruiting a staff through the University of
Arkansas’ mechanical-engineering
department. “We want to be able to put a full support team on the ground
by mid to late October,”
Fredericks said.
Truang said that his hope is that the Vietnamese can then learn the
process and eventually do the work.
EarthCare, which got its start as a client of the university’s Genesis
Business Incubator, has a similar
composting project in Arizona, a pilot project scheduled in Mexico and
representatives going to Saudi
Arabia to talk about a project. A previous effort to establish a
composting project in China got caught in a
political dispute.
Fredericks said, however, that the money is already in the bank for this
project. He said he’s been
working with the officials of Vietnam and the FMT Corp. for about a year
and a half to put the project
together. FMT Corp. is responsible for checking out proposed projects to
determine whether they will
work and then whether Vietnam wants them.
Joining EarthCare for the announcement were An Do, the vice chairman of
the People’s Committee of
Hanoi; Son Nguyen, deputy director of planning and investment for Daklak
Province; Le Chi Thanh,
chairman of FMT; state Sen. David Malone of Fayetteville; UA Dean
Bernard Madison and state Rep.
Sue Madison, also of Fayetteville.
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Cheryl Fredericks
http://www.uark.edu/~ecti/
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