From Guest Blogger Brooke Chaplan: Green Dream–Six Environmental Developments From Students

Sustainable living is quickly becoming mainstream as businesses, families, and communities incorporate more environmentally friendly standards into every day practices. For example, many families now consciously choose less waste over convenience, and businesses make investments that lead to energy efficiency in the long term. It appears this lifestyle is the inherited legacy of the next generation of scientists and engineers as well, and it has shaped many of their ideas for the future. Here are six examples of sustainable innovations formulated by today’s students.

Ocean Clean Up
According to environmental scientist Marcus Eriksen, there is an estimated 270,000 tons of plastic trash floating in the oceans. This presents significant problems for aquatic animals that ingest small plastic particles. Boyan Slat who is an engineering major at Deflt University of Technology in the Netherlands designed a clean-up array that would systematically comb the earth’s water ways collecting trash. According to the research conducted by Slat, the clean-up array could fix the trash problem in five years of use.

Water Purification System
An estimated 783 million people live without an adequate supply of drinking water, and at least six million people die from unsanitary water conditions yearly especially in the developing nations in Africa and Asia. Many ideas for water purification have been produced as a result of this need. However, these systems are often expensive and use excessive amounts of energy. Deepika Kurup designed and built a working prototype for a solar powered water purification system as a seventh grade student.

Converting Plastic Waste to Biofuel
Students are not only figuring out ways to collect the world’s plastic trash, but are also inventing ways to put the garbage to good use. Azza Abdel Hamid Faiad was a 16 year old Egyptian student when she created a way to break down plastic into usable biofuel raw materials using calcium bentonite as a relatively low cost catalyst. Faiad’s idea which does not produce harmful emission by-products from the broken down plastic is being developed for use immediately.

Transforming Trash to Treasure for Those in Need
Nearly everyone has noticed the massive amounts of non-biodegradable waste that is rapidly filling up landfills. However, 12 year old Max Wallack thought of a way to recycle the materials for temporary shelter for homeless citizens and those impacted by natural disasters. His invention is called the Home Dome, and it uses plastic bags reinforced with Styrofoam packing peanuts to create the temporary shelters.

Cutting Down on Water Waste
Almost all parents complain their kids waste too much water bathing, brushing teeth, and doing other chores. Well, Elizabeth Rintels took these complaints to heart and invented the Water Watcher. Her innovation attaches to faucets and monitors how much water is actually being used. The water monitor also sends out an audio alert for every half gallon of water that is used. This is great for parents who want to save water, but don’t want to have to watch every time kids brush their teeth.

Plastic Decomposition
While Faiad sought to break down plastic for its estimated $78 million value as biofuel, her 16 year old peer in Canada just wants to get rid of the plastic quickly. Without even a master of civil engineering, Daniel Burd noticed that a great deal of his time dedicated for household chores involved the disposal of plastic bags. He knew the bags would hang around in landfills for a long time so he found a way to speed up decomposition of plastics using microbes.
Previous generations may leave future ones with mounds of fiscal debt. However, these creative young people are determined that they will not be caught holding the bag especially when it comes to environmentally friendly, plastic trash clean up.