Chandralal Somaratna:
Chandralal Somaratna is a Chemical Engineer by profession with an M.Sc in Polymer Science & Technology and more than thirty years of industrial experience. During those thirty years, he was employeed in pharmaceuticals, cement, petrochemicals, and activated carbon industries, working in the functional areas of production, quality assurance, research and development, manufacturing management, and project management.
Chandralal completed technical training at Du Pont sites in Camden and Waynesboro USA; at Union Carbide sites in Charleston and Texas; at KHD Humboldt Wedag, Ibau Hamburg, Germany; and at Blue Circle operations in U.K. He has attended International Cement Seminars in USA and different training programmes conducted by UOP, Chem Systems, and the Society for Professional Advancement, the Netherlands.
From 1994 to 2010, Chandralal provided Management System Consultancy on ISO 9001, ISO 14001, HACCP/ISO 22000, OHSAS 18001, ISO 27001, ISO 17025, ISO 15189, Balanced Scorecard, Human Resources Management, Six Sigma, Business Continuity Planning, and Disaster Recovery. He completed more than 165 consultancy assignments with clients, including local subsidiaries of Fortune 500 companies such as British American Tobacco, Ericsson Telecommunications, and Sara Lee Courtaulds.
He has made more than one hundred presentations on Quality, Environment, Occupational Health & Safety, Human Resources, Information Security, Business Continuity, Food Safety, and Project Management Systems.
Since 2010, Chandralal has been mainly involved in researching climate-change-related topics. In July, 2010 he proposed “Highway Solarisation” to help Sri Lanka combat climate change — advocating over-highway installation of solar panels to provide alternative energy, to facilitate a transition to electric vehicles, and also to reduce light absorption and heat re-radiation from those same highways. He has contributed more than 40 climate-change related articles to “Daily FT”, and “Daily News” the two main Sri Lankan news publications. He has also made several presentations to various professional associations and intellectual bodies in Sri Lanka on Climate Change related topics.