Almost there

This week we finished writing almost all of the texts for our webpage, and delivered them to the skillful web designers of Milk+chocolate. The first draft our page will be ready in less than two weeks, which leaves us about a week to make final adjustments.
A while ago we had a meeting with our the course organizer and our professor. Titled "project clinic", we presented what have achieved so far and what is exactly is going to be our final product. The most important advice to us was that we need to be very focused on the core message of our webpage; not just to have a pretty page with some scattered texts.

Today's meeting @ Design Factory

We just finished our sum-up meeting at DeFa with good results: We'll be sending the texts and illustrations of our "Public For Phosphorus" website to the Milk+Chocolate people next monday & they can start working with the site. I'm sure that the result will be awesome :)

While the Milk+Chocolates are working with the website, we are spreading the word about our up-coming portal. To reach as many people as possible, we have to use several information channels such as Facebook, Twitter, magazines and radio just to mention some. TV advertising would be extremely effective, but unfortunately with our budget, a TV commercial is just an unrealistic dream.

So stay tuned, maybe you'll be hearing about our project on Wappuradio, or reading about it in Aino magazine!

Our web page

It has been a while since our last project update, so this is basically what we have been up to...After the mid-review our group has been mainly focused on gathering information and material for our “public for phosphorus” web page. During these weeks, we have had lots of help from our Kemira experts, who have provided us with useful information about phosphorus recovery from waste waters and the potential technologies that could be used (or are already used) for this purpose.

The goal of the web page is to raise public awareness about the importance of phosphorus and phosphorus recycling in Finland. Our target audience is all Finns from all ages and backgrounds, therefore the main language of the page will be Finnish. On Wednesday 4^th of April we met our web page designer, who had a great plan for the design of our web page. Here are the main decisions we made about our web page.

1.    an informative web page about phosphorus recycling

The web page will include basic information about phosphorus, phosphorus recycling technologies and the recycling situation in Finland and globally.

2.    a web page for all ages

We will try to create a web page that is reader friendly by adding pictures and graps and making the texts short, interesting and easy to understand.

3.    a web page that looks good and is easy to use

The page will be well structured and simple to use. In order to attract visitors, it is important that the web page looks good and professional. Our web page designers will help us with designing a web page that both look good and work perfectly.

Fake Fertilizers

Not all fertilizers used in agriculture are genuine. Production of fake fertilizers is big business. Fake fertilizers can be both ineffective and dangerous as they can contain many chemicals that are not suitable for agricultural applications.

Resource Politics

Phosphorus is a political atom. You need it in order to grow food. For Finland,  phosphorus is less political as finnish population is only 5.4 million and as it is pretty easy to grow enough food for it but for countries that don't have their own rock phosphorus deposits like India and central europe access to rock phosphorus becomes an issue of national security and food security.

 

Peak Phosphorus

World food production is dependent on rock phosphorus and unfortunately it is a limited resource. Recycling phosphorus is one way of making best use of limited resource.
http://ekodiplomaatit.blogspot.com/2011/01/tarvitaanko-hiilidioksidia-lisaa.html

http://kemikaalikimara.blogspot.com/2010/01/kylmasti-ilman-fosfaatteja.html

http://blogs.helsinki.fi/ruoka-ja-kestavyys/2009/05/31/fosforikysymys-onko-vastauksia/

http://www.luomu.fi/mistaruokatulee/haastattelut/Turtola/Turtola_controller.swf

Mid-review

On Monday the 20th of February we had the chance to see what other groups were doing, and to show what we've done so far. Although the meeting was called "mid-review", it was more like a first look.
Just like us, the other groups are still looking for the right way to execute their project. Instead of presenting what we're going to do, we let the audience do a a bit of brainstorming for us. Asking questions like "What do you think would happen without phosphorus?" and "How would you tell the public about this?", we wanted to get some on help on "thinking outside the box".
The resulting answers are presented in the picture below. 

Good ideas come in all colours.

We got a lot of good ideas for our project. Thanks to everyone for participating!

A short presentation

I guess we should start with a short presentation... Well, we are a group of five students + our mentor, and we are from the Aalto University, and this blog is working as an information and communication channel within the Sustainable Technologies studio course. We are the Pfp- group, "Public for Phosphorus", where the aim is to raise public awareness related to phosphorus recovery and recycling. This is because phosphorus is an ending non-renewable resource, but still one of the most essential components for all kind of plants to grow.

So far we have come up with a project plan, where we have defined our goals and upcoming steps. During the spring we will work with material about phosphorus recycling, mainly from sludge, meet experts in the field  willing to help and being part of the project and find different channels to bring the subject into the public discussion. By now we have had two expert meetings, one with Kemira and the other with one of our university -teachers. The final outcome of the Pfp-project will be a website where e.g. information about different phosphorus recycling possibilities are presented.
While waiting for the end result, please follow the blog and see the project proceed!

Best Regards,

The Pfp-group :)

Here we go!

First ideas...