The geothermal mandarin drying facility of Seferihisar Municipality in Doganbey had been awarded as sustainable innovation by Sustainability Academy.
Sustainability Academy presents annual awards to the associations and institutions, which develop innovative projects to be good examples for sustainability. Unlike the previous years, at this fourth year of the competition the projects of local governments had been evaluated.
SUSTAINABLE INNOVATION AWARD WENT TO SEFERIHISAR
At the first year of this category, along with Seferihisar Municipality winning the award by mandarin drying facility, Ipeker Tekstil was awarded by vegan textile processes and Ece Tile was awarded by bioxide tile project.
WE ALWAYS STAND FOR ALTERNATIVE FARMING
Seferihisar Mayor Tunc Soyer delivered the award and stated the importance of alternative farming Seferihisar is standing for: "Via our alternative farming policy, we aim to protect the village population and farmers and encourage them to earn more by producing more. The greatest source of income in Seferihisar is mandarin orange. As we were assigned to duty, we witnessed that the farmers gave up growing mandarins, can’t sell the fruit, therefore opt for leaving it on the field to rot. We formed a producers’ union by the initiation of the municipality. We processed and marketed the fruit together. The municipality bought a mandarin drying and packaging facility to endorse it over the Mandarin Union. We eliminated the middlemen. The next phase was to produce side products of mandarins. We finalized the construction of cold storage room. And the latest step was to dry mandarins with thermal energy, which enabled the fruit to be on the market shelves for all over the year. Our dried mandarin project was praised in all over Turkey and crowned by the Sustainable Innovation Award today. I would like express my gratitude to the Sustainability Academy for choosing our project. From now on, we have a bigger responsibility. We will work harder to deem worthy for this prize. "