GreenMindAward for a sustainable Bernoulliborg

Tuan Anh Nguyen and Faris Nizamic, PhD students in the Distributed Systems research group, have won first prize in the GreenMindAward competition with their plan to make the Bernoulliborg extremely sustainable in terms of waste disposal and the use of power and water.

Their plan is based on simple ideas that would be easy to implement, such as special fittings on all taps, economical toilet flushing systems and warning systems to monitor the energy use of your PC. This could reduce the amount of water used by 45 percent and that of energy by almost 8 percent.

Winning the GreenMindAward means that the PhD students’ plan will actually be implemented as part of the University's 440th anniversary celebrations.

However, the ideas that won second and third prize were also so good that the University has decided to implement them too.

Second prize went to Honours students Johannes Wilbertz and Chamon Suresh Gopal, who invented a solar panel system to heat water for the showers at the ACLO sports complex. Professor of Photophysics Maria Antoinetta Loi was awarded third prize for her solar umbrella, an umbrella with plastic solar cells that you can connect to your laptop if you want to work outside on a sunny day.

The University had reserved EUR 100,000 for the winning idea, but this amount had been doubled, Jan de Jeu of the Board of the University announced when presenting the prizes – another EUR 100,000 is being made available to realize the runner-up idea, as well as EUR 4000 to produce the solar umbrella.