Of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, the two that should be integrated into the curriculum are SDG 8 (“Decent work and economic growth”) and SDG 12 (“Responsible consumption and production”).

For teaching specialist skills in the logistics and production management areas of focus in conjunction with key competencies such as teamwork, we have been running so-called practical case projects for many years now at Faculty 3: Business and Law. To achieve this objective, students work on a specific complex task assignment of a practice partner. These projects are frequently carried out in socioeconomic institutions and give students the opportunity to “think outside the box.”

For example, one project was realized together with the Flörsheim social department store. Social department stores offer used and donated products that are recycled in the name of sustainability; customers can acquire furniture and consumer goods at attractive prices. Social department stores provide employment opportunities and employee training programs, mostly for the long-term unemployed or people who have overcome addiction. In a student collaborative effort, the receiving and storage areas were redesigned and a concept was developed for the introduction of a merchandise management system to standardize processes.

Support was provided for several projects in collaboration with Behindertenhilfe Bergstraße in planning a new workshop, among other things, together with students. They checked the flow of materials in the laundry facilities (washing machine and dryer capacities, labelling laundry items) and the kitchen (turnaround times for prepared meals, process flow for preparing fresh produce) and developed proposals for optimizing process flows. This was followed a years later by carpentry and assembly projects for the new workshop, which is up and running. As an offshoot of this course, a research project was developed in which students likewise participated. The goal was to develop a feasibility study on the disassembly of spare parts from old appliances in workshops for people with disabilities. Besides the aim of conserving resources, the projects are additionally designed to help workshops for people with disabilities to become stronger while opening up new spheres of activities to them.

The project results are incorporated into logistics courses where, for instance, resource-efficient and disassembly-friendly manufacturing is discussed in the “Production Logistics” module.