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Everybody Wins!
P3 Student Design Competition for Sustainability Sparks Environmental Innovation
On April 24 and 25, 2010, forty-two teams comprised of budding scientists and engineers from colleges and universities from across the country gathered at the Sixth Annual National Sustainable Design Expo on the National Mall in Washington, DC, to showcase their innovative designs for advancing environmental sustainability.
The teams were all competing for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s coveted P3 Award for sustainability.
The three “P’s” in P3 are People, Prosperity and the Planet. Established in 2004, the competition is focused on benefiting people, promoting prosperity, and protecting the planet through innovative designs to address challenges to sustainability in both the developed and developing world. The goal is to foster sustainability education in the nation's colleges and universities while tapping the creative energy of undergraduate and graduate student design and research teams.
"Sustainable innovations like the ones created by our P3 Award winners are the environmental and economic future of our nation. In fields from agriculture to architecture to energy production, sustainability is the true north on the path ahead," said Paul T. Anastas, assistant administrator for the EPA's Office of Research and Development.
The competition has two phases. In phase I, student teams and their faculty advisors submit research proposals for a chance to earn up to $10,000 in seed money to research and develop their design projects during the academic year.
This year, forty-two P3 student teams were invited to the National Mall in Washington, DC, to present their projects at the National Sustainable Design Expo. Each team’s design was reviewed by a panel of judges convened by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
The panel's evaluations were then passed on to EPA officials, who awarded the prestigious EPA P3 Award to 14 teams. The honor includes the opportunity to receive up to $75,000 in additional grant money, allowing the students to continue to work on their ideas, advancing them from prototype to the marketplace. This year, a total of more than $1 million will be awarded to the 14 winning teams.
"Innovations such as these keep our country competitive and healthy. Congratulations to our winners, and to everyone who participated, for their efforts to create scientific and technological innovations that will lead us into a sustainable future," said Assistant Administrator Anastas during the awards ceremony held April 26, 2010.
This year’s 14 winning P3 teams and their sustainable designs are:
Appalachian State University
Biomass Gasification for Agricultural Energy Sources and Soil Enrichment
Clemson University
SEED: Emergent Container Housing Initiative – Solutions for the Caribbean
Clarkson University
Farm Waste to Energy: A Sustainable Solution for Small-Scale Farms
Clarkson University
Cornell University
Drexel University
Alkali-Activated Slag Cement (AASC) as a Sustainable Building Material
Humboldt State University
Smoothing the Peaks: Smart Outlets to Reduce Brownouts on Micro-Hydroelectric Mini-Grids in Bhutan
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University
Enhancing Urban Sustainability through the Application of Permaculture Principles
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Virus Removal in Slow-Sand Filters for Rural Mayan Communities
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech)
Wellesley College, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Qinghai Normal University
A Comprehensive Platform for Rural Energy Optimization in the Himalayan Region
For more information on the P3 Award competition: http://www.epa.gov/P3