The world will be a little greener thanks to the winners of the University of Wisconsin 2010 Climate Leadership Challenge who were chosen earlier this week.
The four winning teams, composed entirely of UW students, had $100,000 distributed among them for their efforts. The highest scoring team, which created a power source for developing countries, took home $50,000 from the pot.
The team’s project, the Microformer, was judged to be the Most-Action-Ready solution in the contest entries because it efficiently generates enough energy to charge a cell phone or power a stove or a small wind turbine. It can be created with post-consumer products, such as old microwave transformers or paint cans, CLC Coordinator Keith Cronin said.
UW College of Engineering graduate students Jonathan Lee, Patricio Mendoza and Dan Ludois made up the team.
Cronin speculated the group may use the money to pay back some of their student loans and work on implementing their project in developing countries around the world with help from Engineers Without Borders.
The projects were judged not only on how quickly they could be implemented, but also on the social impact each would have on the community.
One such project, which may impact how the Madison community looks at its food, came from the Snowshoe, LLC team.
The team, which consisted of UW graduate students Claus Moberg, Jami Morton and Matt Luedke, claimed $15,000 for their plan to build a database of grocery store food and let consumers access the amount of carbon used to bring the food to the grocery store shelves through an iPhone application.
Cronin said the team is in discussion with Madison Fresh Market to build the first part of the database there.
“Eventually they will be able to trace [food] to wherever you are in the country and [you can] pick up a can of tomato soup and know how much carbon it took to get it to you,” Cronin said.
Moberg said the iPhone app would also let shoppers know if there were any other similar products in the store with a smaller carbon footprint. He said overall the response from food producers has been positive, and he hopes to expand the range of the database to more grocery stores outside the Madison area.
Another award-winning project that will affect communities outside the United States is the Jatropha Stove Project — a stove that uses vegetable oil instead of charcoal for energy.
The project was designed for people in Haiti by a team of UW graduate students who were awarded $10,000. Cronin said the project is just as socially innovative as its design.
While the current regional practice is to chop down trees for charcoal to use for energy, the project would plant Jatropha trees. They simultaneously reforest an area while producing a bean whose oil can be used for cooking.
Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies spokesperson Tom Sinclair said this is the contest’s second year, and the Global Stewards Society, the organization that provides the award, doubled it to $100,000 from $50,000 last year.
