In recent decades, Malaysia has been known as one of the world's leading producers and exporters of palm oil products. Every year, the number of palm oil mills increases rapidly, thus increasing the capacity of fresh fruit bunch waste or effluent discharge. Based on the data from the Malaysian Palm Oil Board in 2012, Malaysia produced 99.85 million tons of fresh fruit bunch (FFB) per year. However, about 5-5.7 tons of water was required in order to sterilize the palm fruit bunches and clarify the extracted oil to produce 1 ton of crude palm oil resulting in 50% of the water turning into palm oil mill effluent (POME). POME is one of the major environmental pollutants in Malaysia. The characteristics of POME and its behavior, if discharged directly, in water are described in this chapter. The suspended solid and nutrient content in POME could be able to support the growth of algae. This chapter aims to demonstrate that POME could be used as a main source for algae production, and this effluent is one of the main environmental problems in the tropical region especially in Malaysia.

The aim of this study was to improve the commercialization level in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). For achieving this goal various factors and issues were examined to identify how they affect the procedure of university commercialization. These factors include the role of technology transfer office /center, availability of finance, availability of potential licensee and entrepreneurial orientation (EO) among the university researchers. Among these four factors, this study focused more on EO among academic researchers and its effect on the commercialization rate. This study was based on a qualitative research method and was designed to use a case study approach. For investigating the factors and issues in this study, a total of ten face-to-face interviews were conducted. The respondents were chosen from inventors, researchers, academic entrepreneurs, and Technology Transfer Office staff in UTM. The researcher utilized the content-analysis approach to analyze the data obtained from the semi-structured interviews of the respondents. The results indicated that EO among the university researchers, the role of technology transfer office /center, the availability of potential licensee and availability of finance were significant to the research output commercialization at university. Overall, the most critical factor was availability of finance.

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The significance of university research had been obtaining a new concentration during the past few decades particularly, regarding their capacity to generate innovation and start-up companies. Universities are not only responsible for teaching and R&D activities but they are expected to commercialize the research result and also establish spin-off companies. This study attempts to illustrate the crucial factors that assist the commercialization process of university research result. This paper reveals that the success of university commercialization is influenced by several factors including researchers’ perception, time, entrepreneurial team, networking, technology stage, funding, market research and TTO.

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Waste generation nowadays is rising in the world and it seems hard to prevent it. Solid Waste Management (SWM) has been a major problem worldwide in most of the fast growing towns and cities among the developing countries all around the world. Food waste and green waste constitute high volumes of municipal solid waste (MSW). The application of compost in the agricultural sector can contribute to sustainable soil health and other co-benefits. The compost produced from biological waste does not contain any chemicals unfavorable to living soil. The objective of this research was to calculate the greenhouse gas emission from the compost processed from the food and green wastes generated on-campus in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) as a pilot project. The result indicated that the composting process promotes the university as a green campus by converting organic wastes into valuable products such as organic fertilizer.