A COLLEGE startup in Shenzhen is turning surplus fruit into eco-friendly organic fertilizer, the Shenzhen Evening News reported yesterday.

    Shang Lizhi and his team from Shenzhen University started the project in October last year, as one of the Enactus projects at Shenzhen University. Enactus is an international organization that brings together university students, academic professionals and industry leaders to start businesses that help society.

    “After we joined Enactus, we began to pay more attention to social problems,” said Shang. “When we found many oranges in Xinhui, Jiangmen, were wasted every year, we tried to figure out what we could do to change it.”

    Shang said farmers in Xinhui usually sell dry orange rinds, throwing away the orange pulp because it is worth only a few cents per kilogram.

    “Most of the orange pulp was thrown into rivers, into waste stations or tossed out by the road,” Shang said, adding that his team’s research showed that 30,000 tons of orange pulp was produced in Xinhui last year but 80 percent of it was wasted. The amount produced doubled this year.

    According to Shang, orange pulp can only stay fresh for four hours without the rind. Using the pulp to make jam or orange juice would cost too much because of refrigerated transport and storage costs.

    “Therefore, we decided to make organic fertilizer with the pulp, which seems more practical to us,” Shang said.

    Shang said his team created a business model with the help of Enactus — buying surplus orange pulp from Xinhui farmers and partnering with fertilizer manufacturers to sell fertilizer.

    “We paid agricultural specialists to test the farmland for our buyers and provided different organic fertilizers based on what was needed in the soil,” Shang said, adding that most farmers know little about scientific fertilization, but overuse of fertilizer leads to pollution.

    “We started this project with three purposes — stemming the waste of agricultural resources in Xinhui, introducing scientific fertilization and increasing the farmers’ income,” Shang said.

    The field research and two rounds of experiments have cost Shang’s team 3,000 yuan (US$471).

    “We carried out the research with our own money and the award we won from a startup competition, while Enactus also sponsored us with grants,” Shang said.

    Shang’s team recently gained technical support from agricultural experts at South China Agricultural University in Guangzhou.

    Shang said his team will bow out and let fertilizer manufacturers and farmers continue cooperation once the business model is optimized. “We don’t intend to found a company. We only want to solve social problems with business methods,” Shang said.

    (Zhang Yang)