Assistant Project Coordinator (Product Design & Development)
May 2016 – March 2019
Australian – Sri Lankan university partnership to develop community based waste recycling businesses
Scope of the Project
The project ‘Australian – Sri Lankan university partnership to develop community based waste recycling businesses’ was a collaboration project between University of Moratuwa, University of Sri Jayawardanapura, University of Jaffna and University of West Australia. The main focus of the project was to discover different waste materials in Sri Lanka and to develop business entities, which will produce products manufactured from waste composites. I was the designer of the project.
Assigned tasks
- Identifying feasible waste materials
- Developing composite materials
- Develop marketable products from composite materials
- Teach the community groups to follow the process through a workshop series
Main challenges
- The communities only had access to heat press machines and the products had to be made out of that machine.
- Some communities already relied only on products that were purchased by a niche market, so had to develop better products that would cater a mass market.
- The community groups did not have special prior skills in high quality production and as a result the products had to be simple to make and a mistake in a later stage of production process should always be able to corrected easily to avoid wastage
Community businesses
A community business that utilizes industrial waste and plastic waste materials to create upcycled products
Paalam (The bridge) Project
A community group in northern part of Sri Lanka that creates products by upcycling waste fabrics and waste plastics
Material Development
A range of composite materials developed using industrial waste materials in Sri Lanka
