Bioeconomy Campus Week brought bioeconomy close to the public

The BLOOM Nordic hub took part in the Bioeconomy Campus Week by organizing a seminar and open discussion sessions to raise awareness and to involve public to discuss and share their thoughts about different topics of bioeconomy.

The Bioeconomy Campus Week is a traditional event organized in each year at the beginning of September in Saarijärvi, Finland. It’s organized by the JAMK Bioeconomy Institute and the vocational school of Northern Central Finland. This year the campaign week took place in 2.-7.9.2019.

The week included, for example, the Future Bioeconomy seminar, workshops for entrepreneurs, sustainable picnic for students and the Bioeconomy Campus Day giving a nice closing for the whole week. Also, this year the national Wood and bioeconomy fair took place during the Bioeconomy Campus Week thus giving a lot of synergy for the events.

Bioeconomy enters the Woodfair

This year the term bioeconomy became more diverse in the Woodfair as BLOOM co-organized the Future Bioeconomy seminar in Sep 4^th in Jyväskylä together with the Bioeconomy Campus. The seminar aimed to showcase different fields and future possibilities of bioeconomy while still presenting the great work already done locally within research and projects. The seminar was streamed online and the recordings can be watched here. The presentations are in Finnish.

From the seminar, we learned that the side streams of forest industry can be used in concrete production thus reducing the CO2 footprint of concrete, the black soldier flies are the model pupils of circular economy and that wood-based substances can be used to fight against antibiotic resistance. Also, the new BioBord platform was introduced for bringing together bioeconomy developers around Baltic Sea region to a joint table to solve global and local challenges with bioeconomy innovations.

We were also delighted to collaborate with the New wood project and to have their amazing New wood exhibition with us in the Bioeconomy campus stand! Eveliina Pokela from the New wood project gave an eye-opening presentation in the Future bioeconomy seminar about the new wood-based innovations and how they relate to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. The exhibition was available for all public the whole day in the fair attracting a lot of interested visitors. The New wood project aims to increase people’s awareness about wood-based bioeconomy.

During the last day in the Woodfair, the BLOOM project and the new possibilities of wood were presented on stage by our project specialist Aino Voutilainen working within the BLOOM project.

Let’s talk about bioeconomy

The Bioeconomy campus day attracted this year 1 500 visitors to Bioeconomy campus in Tarvaala, Saarijärvi, to find out what is bioeconomy and what do we do in the Bioeconomy campus. The day included a lot of different kind of activities from seminars and work shows to auction, match show and cricket tastings. Visitors could go and see domestic animals in the animal yard and the barn and the local producers were also selling their products in the market area.

The BLOOM project organized three open discussion sessions with the title of “Let’s talk about bioeconomy”. First, we had our agrology student Sami Virtanen to tell about black soldier flies and how can they be used in circular economy. Sami is a true specialist when it comes to insects. He has been working within the Vinsects-project to solve the local potential of insect production and the possibilities in small-scale entrepreneurship.

After that, Mirja Riipinen, our lecturer of domestic animal production, told about sustainable milk production. The topic was very hot thus bringing about lot of discussion not only about milk production but also about cattle growing overall.

Last but not least, project coordinator Jaakko Tukia told about the benefits and difficulties of biogas production. Biogas cars were on the lips of many participants and Jaakko gave some insights about what’s the future of biogas as a traffic fuel in the coming years in Finland.

“More of these!”

The Bioeconomy Campus Week was full of activities and good vibes around bioeconomy. Despite we would have wished to see even more participants in our events, the atmosphere was positive and the BLOOM activities got a lot of good feedback such as “a quality event”, “more of these”. We think it’s good to continue from here to reach out to even more bigger audiences!

If you have any questions about the events, please contact Aino Voutilainen (aino.voutilainen@jamk.fi).

Written by Aino Voutilainen from JAMK University of Applied Sciences