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Malaysian exchange student calls the hands-on lesson an eye-opener she plans to bring home to Malaysia's farmers.

Twenty-eight exchange students from Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP) traded their classroom for a mangosteen orchard on 14 August 2026, taking part in a hands-on biochar workshop at a farm in Cha-Uat District, Nakhon Si Thammarat — the practical centerpiece of a month-long environmental exchange course hosted by the Center of Excellence for Ecoinformatics and School of Science, Walailak University (WU).

Held at Supot's mangosteen farm, the workshop showed students how to turn mangosteen rinds — waste that farmers normally burn or leave to rot after harvest, releasing carbon dioxide and methane into the air — into biochar, a stable, carbon-rich soil amendment that locks most of that carbon away instead of letting it escape into the atmosphere. It was led by Associate Professor Dr. Krisanadej Jaroensutasinee, WU's Assistant Dean for Research, School of Science and Director of the Center of Excellence for Ecoinformatics, who also leads a university project that trains farmers to produce export-quality mangosteen using smart farm technology.

The workshop is one component of the Environmental Conservation and Global Warming course that the 28 students, all from UniMAP's Faculty of Chemical Engineering and Technology, are taking from 5-28 August 2026.

Dr. Krisanadej walked students through the process: mangosteen rinds are sun-dried, then sealed in a kiln and heated to roughly 500–750°C in a low-oxygen environment so they carbonize instead of burning to ash. The resulting biochar is quenched to lock in the carbon, crushed into a fine, porous material, and "charged" with compost or microbial teas so it becomes an active soil fertilizer rather than an inert byproduct.

 

 

For Chua Xiao Hui, a second-year Chemical Engineering Technology (Industrial Biotechnology) student at UniMAP, seeing the process in person made the lecture material click. "During the lecture, I could not really imagine how the process worked, but today I was able to see how biochar is produced using agricultural waste," she said. "The moment that best captured my experience was when I was quite surprised to learn that the second burning could help reduce gas emissions. I had never thought about this before — it seemed like a small additional step in the process, but it could actually help reduce emissions during burning." It was also her first time seeing a solar-powered monitoring device used to measure soil moisture and temperature — "to get a yummy mangosteen," she added.

Beyond locking away carbon, biochar offers benefits raw waste doesn't: its naturally alkaline chemistry neutralizes the acidic soils common to tropical orchards, its porous structure acts like a sponge for water, nutrients, and beneficial microbes that would otherwise wash away in monsoon rains, and the heat treatment sterilizes pathogens, pests, and weed seeds that raw compost can carry.

For many of the visiting students, the workshop was their first time seeing a mangosteen harvest up close. Dr. Krisanadej noted that Southern Thailand and Northern Malaysia share nearly identical growing conditions — acidic, rain-leached soils and heavy agricultural waste from mangosteen, durian, and palm oil — making the lesson directly relevant back home. Several students told him afterward they were interested in starting their own biochar businesses once they returned to Malaysia.

Chua said she was already planning how to pass the technique on. "I'm really excited to share this technique and my experience with my classmates back home," she said. "I also hope that this technique could help Malaysian farmers increase their production and income." The experience also reshaped how she sees agricultural waste generally: "I already knew that agricultural waste could be turned into useful products, but this technique has expanded my knowledge and made me more interested in learning about other products that can be produced from crop residues."

 

 

The scale of the opportunity is significant. Mangosteen rinds make up roughly 60–70% of the fruit's total weight, and Nakhon Si Thammarat — one of Thailand's major mangosteen-producing provinces — generates thousands of tonnes of discarded peel every harvest season. Nearly all of that non-salable waste, Dr. Krisanadej said, could be diverted from dumpsites into biochar production, cutting emissions from open burning and lowering the carbon footprint of the fruit's export supply chain.

Biochar is used and studied across Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Japan, and the United States for restoring degraded soils and cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and is increasingly recognized by voluntary carbon-credit platforms such as Puro.earth as a verified carbon-removal technology.

The workshop is one of six activities under WU's Smart Agriculture Skills Development Project, a collaboration between the university's Center for Academic Services (CAS) and Thailand's Agricultural Research Development Agency (Public Organization), or ARDA, that helps Thai farmers adopt modern technology to raise the value and standard of their production. Dr. Krisanadej thanked Assistant Professor Dr. Amonsak Sawusdee, CAS Director and head of the project, along with ARDA, for their support.

 



Photos courtesy of Kampanad Khongwan, Center for Academic Services 
Written by Settaboot Onphakdee, Division of Corporate Communications