Sep 21, 2011

Who are we?

We're team Siruthuli - Cordula, Saken and Lisa and are about to start our Corporate Services Corps (CSC) assignment. CSC is one of IBM's corporate social responsibility programs whereby international teams of IBMers are selected to carry out a 4 week assignment for an NGO. We'll be travelling to Coimbatore in India on September 24th. Our local partner will be Siruthuli, an NGO concerned with environmental issues such as afforestation, waste management and awareness.
Siruthuli is asking us for a strategic plan regarding the water hyacinth growth in the Valankulam tank. This tank is essential for providing Coimbatore with water for irrigation, washing and other secondary uses but has been heavily infested with water hyacinth. The growth of this aggressive plant is boosted by various sources of waste water flowing into the tank.
Throughout our assignment we'll be posting on this blog regularly. Feel free to follow us and leave comments!

We're looking forward to working with Siruthuli on this exciting challenge.

4 comments:

  1. Good Luck!

    Please send questions. I find this subject extremely interesting and like to help.

    Greetings Tim

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  2. This sounds so rewarding, enjoy your time on this project!

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  3. Hello, probably you are well aware about the positive application of this plant, but I would like to send you as well the link to one article for that.
    http://technology.ssc.nasa.gov/suc_stennis_water.html
    The limitation of the plant dissemination could be convert to the positive effects and benefit.

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  4. Thank you Vladi that was definitely a good hint. We knew that water hyacinth could be used for sewage water treatment. But we didn't know that there are already sewage water treatment plants in production which operate on water hyacinth. We will investigate this further.

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