Meet the Team

We are team Taylor's CDP (Compost Drop-off Project) from Taylor's University Lakeside Campus. The team consists of dedicated, hardworking and passionate individuals toward the work. Our mission is turning waste, something that everyone just throws it away into useful stuff.

From left to right: Anila Nur Sidiqa, Thinnesh Ramdas, Khairil Ahmadi, Dhiviya Vijayakumar, Alvin Lu

Brief description of our roles are as follow:

1. Anila Nur Sidiqa (Campaign Leader)

- Assign roles

-Select strategies and tactics to promote crowdfunding campaign

2. Thinnesh Ramdas (Social Media Supervisor/Customer Service Lead)

-Engage with donor or campaign contributor

-Respond to web inquires

3. Khairil Ahmadi (Logistic Supervisor)

-Manage inventory

-In charge of preparing rewards for campaign contributors

4. Dhiviya Vijayakumar (Treasurer)

-Financial Management

-Report team's finance

5. Alvin Lu

-Capture photos and videos

-Oversee and manage video recording

Background of the Project

Often, people do not finish their food because either full or rushing to the class. However, fewer people realize that it would bring negative impact to the environment. According to a survey conducted by Solid Waste Management and Public Cleansing Corporation (SWCrop) in 2018, the amount of waste generated daily in Malaysia was 38142 tonnes. This number has been increased nearly doubled since 2005. The most waste generated come from the food waste which contributes around 44.5% of total waste. Sadly, these wastes are mostly dumped into the landfill because there is little to no effort in reducing them. Dumping the food waste in landfill produces around 4.4 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent per year. If it became a country, it would be the third-largest greenhouse gasses producer in the world. Therefore, we need to take action in order to reduce waste by doing composting. We start off this movement on our campus as it has a lot of restaurants that later generate food wastage.

About the Project

Our group-Taylor's CDP (Compost Drop-off Project) initiates a crowd-funding project to turn the food waste in Taylor's University into high quality of fertiliser. Our fertiliser is able to provide a sufficient amount of nutrients needed for all the plants in Taylor's.  Furthermore, by composting food waste can diminish the concentration of carbon as well as greenhouse gaseous for instance methane gas. Besides, we also help in reducing the cost of maintaining the plants in Taylor's as they usually use the chemical fertiliser is expensive and takes up quite a large portion in the cost distribution of gardening. Moreover, chemical fertilizer might pollute the soil and underground water in high dosage. Our crowdfunding project is set at around RM 805 and the campaign will be up until 3rd October 2019. Rewards will be sent to our pledgers around 20th December 2019.

How Do We Do the Project?

We will place five garbage plastics in five points in a commercial block. The team will ask the food vendors there to separate the food waste from other waste (eg. plastic waste). Then, it will be collected every day for composting. Since in some of the times, the waste generated might be higher than usual, we have a huge storage bin to store them. Dry leaves collected from the carpark will be added to fasten the composting process. Before we start stacking the waste, we should ensure there is enough air circulation by having sufficient holes in the bin. By having enough air circulation, it enables the complete composting process. Once done, we can directly apply fertiliser to the plants.  

The budget of Project

The budget consists of 660 litres of the storage bin to store waste collected from all restaurants in Taylor's, five rollers of garbage plastic, shovel to stack the waste, and gloves. The storage bin has a cover and placed far from the crowd to avoid unpleasant odour. The details of the price are shown in the table below.

How We Approach the Funders 

Our target customer is students of Taylor's University. We would promote the campaign from our circle first as it is easier for us to persuade them to contribute to this campaign. Then, our team is going to approach the students in all restaurants by explaining the impact of food waste on the environment and how they can do to reduce the effect on the environment, During the conversation, we introduce our crowdfunding project and the rewards are given once we are able to accomplish the target. The team would not reveal how the reward will look like to make the funders curious. Moreover, we set the rewards based on money funded and the more money the supporter donates, the more exclusive the reward will be.  Besides, we will spread the links of the crowd-funding project via our social media like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter as these platforms are able to promote the project efficiently. The milestones of the project will be updated here.

Some challenges might be faced by the group are:

• Attract the students to fund the campaign
• It is hard to cope with the fast pace of student life.
• it is hard to get the awareness of the student.

Thus we have to close the gap personally and go out of our ways to overcome the boundaries just to make a smile on others faces.