One of the plants we’ll be visiting on our trip is called Eco Treasures. This company takes the leftover pulp from the fruit juice industry and breaks it down into fruit seed oils and powders, which can then be used as food supplements, natural colorants, and cosmetic products. Basically, they use everything they can get out of this leftover pulp and turn it into products that can be marketed. Things that would seem like waste to people are repurposed into products that have value, and I’m very excited to see the technology used in the manufacturing process that makes all this possible. The manufacturing and ergonomics behind these sustainability processes is what I am most familiar with as an Industrial Engineer, so learning about supercritical CO2 extraction and cold pressing in the process will be very interesting to me. I’m also curious to see if the layout played a role within the design of this particular plant in order to eliminate unnecessary wastes of time or movement. Visiting all the plants/facilities on the itinerary will give me the chance to see new perspectives on how problems and processes are approached, and it will be interesting to see if these plants/facilities in Belgium operate in a similar fashion or if they are unique to their own areas.
I won’t only get new perspectives while in Belgium. There will be plenty of new foods, drinks, and architecture to experience as well! I’m definitely ready to see if all the hype about Belgian chocolate is true since I have the worst sweet tooth on the planet. In addition to that, staying in a place that looks like you’re hundreds of years in the past for two weeks is going to be surreal. Just meeting people from the university and the city will be a great source of knowledge about the culture of Belgium and I plan on taking advantage of that as much as possible. I want to learn some of the language, go to the most popular places, and be the most obvious tourist ever. So, until then, I will be packing my bags to max capacity (while still managing to forget something) and anxiously waiting for the day we fly out. Goodbye for now!
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My name is Brooke Larkin, and I’m an Industrial Engineering student at the University of Arkansas. For the next two weeks I’ll be posting about my experiences and thoughts on everything I do in Belgium. Thanks for checking in!
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Senior Industrial Engineering major Brooke Larkin is spending the May intersession 2019 in Belgium with our U of A Faculty-Led: Sustainability in the Euro Food System with the help of our Office of Study Abroad Scholarship and the College of Engineering.
Read more from Brooke at https://sites.uark.edu/brlarkin/
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