Everyone gets their say

Infrastructural projects that are abruptly stopped, metro systems that take much longer to be build and turn out to be way more expensive than envisaged – Shi Nan has seen her fair share of projects that went wrong in her home country. “In China, many different governmental departments and investors are involved in projects, making them very complex,” she says.



Yet no country beats the Netherlands, Nan, who is originally from the Chinese city of Xi’an, concludes. “The Dutch are very fond of their polder model, a decision-making style where all parties and stakeholders get their say and where all ideas need to get in balance. Making policies that way however takes a long time. The ineffectiveness has caught international attention. And the Dutch government also recognizes the problem.”

For her Master’s thesis, which she defended last Monday at the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Nan worked for ‘Het Buitenhuis’, a think tank linked to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Het Buitenhuis is experimenting with a serious game called the World-Café. Nan investigated whether this game could be useful in the Netherlands. She played it with officials from different ministries.



As a case study, Nan used the Betuweroute, a freight railway line running from Rotterdam to the German border. The Dutch and the Germans need to agree on the ins and outs of the European Rail Traffic Management System (a cross border safety system), which still needs to be installed. All parties on the Dutch side need to agree before negotiations with the Germans start. The ‘World-Café’ can help them find this consensus, Nan believes.



During the game people are subdivided into two groups. Each group brainstorms about the issues they think are important. The conclusions from the brainstorm sessions from one group are subsequently used as a starting point for further discussion for the other group, and vice versa.



“I liked this research a lot,” says the young engineer. “Most people at the university do simulations and work with numbers, whereas I also did qualitative research, and for that I spoke to many people from government and industry. It helped me develop more skills. And since I want to work in consultancy, for me, meeting all these people was very interesting.” 

Thanks to the trend of people buying light, healthy products, the dairy industry is able to develop many new lucrative products. But this is also problematic, because what should the industry do with all that surplus fat? Making butter from it isn’t a solution, as the butter market is saturated, and that’s not likely to change.

“The decline in milk fat consumption experienced over the last decades has prompted lots of research into alternative uses for this natural fat”, says Dr Marta Lubary, who last month defended her thesis, titled ‘Added-value milk fat derivatives from integrated processes using supercritical technology’.
Lubary believes things will only get worse for the European dairy industry, because this industry is currently protected by a quota system that is set to disappear in 2015. “This system guarantees a minimum selling price. As the EU market price for dairy products is higher than the world price, exports are generally subsidized.

“Subsidized exports are one of the means to absorb excess butter.”
Getting rid of excess fat will become much more difficult when the EU dairy industry loses its protections and must operate in a free market. Luckily milk fat isn’t all that bad, Lubary says: “Triglycerides, the main components of fats, consist of one glycerol molecule and three fatty acid chains. In most milk fat molecules one of these fatty acids has a short chain. And that’s interesting. Short chains are relatively rare in natural fats. You can use them, for example, to make aromatic substances.”

The trick is to obtain pure fractions of the different chains. For this Lubary experimented with a solvent called supercritical carbon dioxide, a relatively high pressured and high temperature carbon dioxide, which, when in such states, has properties that are an intermediate between liquid and gas and are advantageous for processing compounds, such as oils and fats.
“By varying the temperature and pressure, you can vary which fractions of the milk fat the fatty acids dissolve in”, says Lubary, who first used enzymes called lipases, which are also present in our saliva, to break up the milk fat molecules.

But by adding ethanol to the mixture, she managed to form fatty acid ethyl esters, which are molecules with a fruity flavour. Lubary says that she believes she is the first researcher to use this technique for milk fat.
“There was a strong scent of pineapple and pear in the laboratory, and that was a much better smell than when I started my research,” Lubary says, laughing. “I had used fish oil to practice with the supercritical carbon dioxide fractionation technique, and that smelt terrible.”