Today we visited three companies, Vasiliko cement works, VTTV, and CMMI. Vasiliko is a highly vertically integrated company which produces cement and clinker for domestic use as well as exports. Vasiliko was founded in 1963 and is the current largest heavy industry in Cyprus. The company makes use of their own employees and contractors to complete and maintain their operations. These staff help Vasiliko fulfill their duties as a supplier, manufacturer, and distributor with their factories and fully owned port. As a supplier, Vasiliko mines their own limestone, clay, and gypsum in their quarries near the port. They then transport the raw materials to the plant, which with the addition of imported goods not found in Cyprus, is used to make clinker. In their factories, they produce 6000 tons of clinker a day and 75. Billion tons of concrete per year. The process includes quarrying, blending, grinding, and combustion to create clinker. Then the clinker is either exported to other companies or used by vasiliko to then make cement. The clinker is then grinded mixed with 6% gypsum to form cement. Then Vasiliko’s port is used to import and export goods needed for production and the final product respectively. Similarly to the Limassol Port, Vasiliko uses a conveyor belt to lift up the cement into a contraption which will use gravity load the cargo ships. This port acts as vasiliko’s own distribution center sending and receiving different materials. The port also incorporates sustainability into their decision making, for example, they bought a state of the art conveyor belt truck that will last longer and more product more efficiently. The second company, VTTV, works closely with Vasiliko at the port importing liquid petroleum, managing, storing, and distributing it as well. The liquid petroleum is supplied via underwater pipelines from other Mediterranean counties. Once VTTV gets their hand in he liquid petroleum, they add different materials to it to increase the quality, and then distribute from other silos where he inventory is stored. Additionally, VTTV leases out space on the water to companies with fishing farms to make full use of the land.
The third company, CMMI, is a European Union funded nonprofit who is tasked with research and development into making marine infrastructure more eco friendly and sustainable. The complaint is split into three main departments: marine technology, marine services, and marine social services. CMMI uses the findings from their prototypes to further public knowledge and entrepreneurship for eco friendly innovation. CMMI is currently working on many projects in each of these departments with main focus uses on marine surveillance, collision control, data collection, offshore services, and carbon emissions. All of their projects are ideas that they have come up with themselves to innovate the maritime industry. They are researching into marine surveillance via computer science and artificial intelligence to detect objects. A similar thought process is used when dealing with collision control, when objects are detected in the near path of the source, the source will either stop or change direction to avoid the collision. Data collection uses both cameras and sensors to detect changes in the immediate environment to collect and compile information. Offshore services are a tough problem to tackle in the mind of sustainability because they are built on drilling for oil and natural gas. CMMI’s solution is to use marine plants to capture gas to use for an energy source, an example I have personally seen before is using algae. Finally, carbon emissions are the overall goal which can be reduced by implementing any of the prior applications. All of these innovations come from backgrounds of marine life, engineering, or computer science, which provides a great example of how skills learned in school can be applied to many different fields you wouldn’t necessarily expect.
Innovating for sustainability is an integral part of every company we’ve visited so far in research and development or real implementation of processes into supply chains. Sustainable development is at the core of engineering because every company benefits from sustainable innovation. For me personally, Industrial Engineering is quite broad so I’m not quite sure what field I want to go into, but let’s use supply chain management for example. If supply, manufacturing and distribution can all be accomplished by the same company, production will increase because of easier communication which will generate more profit for the company which in the long run will be more sustainable for it. Another example of sustainable innovation is longer lasting machinery which prove to be a worthwhile investment for businesses to save costs down the line. Overall, sustainability is a necessary factor in any business decision making and innovation and can only serve to benefit me in my career.