A team of professors and eight students from the Production and Systems Department of the School of Engineering at the University of Minho took part in the Waste Summit Brasília 2024 from 22 to 26 January.

During this week, students from four countries (Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal and Brazil) worked in multidisciplinary teams to plan a project capable of guaranteeing solutions to improve the lives and work of Brasília’s rubbish collectors. Upon their return, the students became ambassadors for the project at their home institutions in order to develop it over the course of the semester.

Rui M. Lima is the coordinator of the project and emphasises “the innovative nature of this initiative, in that we have teams of students working in international and intercultural environments to develop proposals for real problems that make a direct contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals”.

The University of Minho was represented by a group of 1st year students from the Master’s programme in Operations Engineering and Management (MEGO) and professors Rui M. Lima and Anabela Alves from the School of Engineering’s Production and Systems Department.

The Waste Summit Brasília 2024 was the first event of the ERASMUS+ EGALITARIAN project – Education, Digitalisation and CollaboratIon for Sustainability – funded by the European Commission and coordinated by the University of Aalborg, Denmark, a leading institution in Problem & Project Based Learning. In addition to the University of Minho, this project has partners in Saxion University (Netherlands) and the University of Brasilia (host of the event).

For more information, please visit the project page: https://egalitarian.eu/