Plastic waste. Poor roofing. Unemployment. Poverty. — Four developing world problems with one solution. In sixty years, the world has produced 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic and recycled only 9%. In developing countries, plastic waste is generally burned, releasing pollutants into the atmosphere. Quality roofing material is often unaffordable for many subsistence farmers and poor urban dwellers. Trash to Tiles (T3) addresses all of these issues by changing the paradigm to use plastic waste as a vast, profitable resource. T3’s innovative, energy and cost efficient technology produces quality, affordable roofing tiles from recycled plastic using only one machine which entrepreneurs can easily finance. Housing is made safer and more comfortable, and plastic waste and atmospheric pollution are reduced. The franchise business model empowers local entrepreneurs to achieve economic independence and enables Trash to Tiles to scale rapidly.
One Village Philippines is a multidisciplinary team of fifteen engineering students within the UC San Diego Global TIES program. This team is working together with the non-profit organization Gawad Kalinga to support its mission of alleviating poverty for communities across the Philippines by providing humanitarian solutions via engineering services. Due to limited lighting, nighttime travel is especially difficult for residents and they often feel unsafe. Additionally, power outages often occur within the community due to electrical failures. Through the development of a sustainable lighting solution, the SolarE team addresses the need for sufficient lighting throughout the village at night and catalyzes social entrepreneurship within the Filipino community by empowering villagers to produce and sell the solar light locally.
Access to clean water is a luxury many of us take for granted. Yet, millions of people worldwide are not so lucky. Our team will use existing infrastructure and familiarity with solar technologies, off-grid, bio-inspired desalination through synthetic transpiration to help enable the provision of clean water access to nearly 75 million households in India alone. Synthetic transpiration is a bio-inspired desalination technology that requires no external energy inputs besides sunlight. Mimicking water transport mechanisms found in mangrove trees, this technology uses sunlight to induce water evaporation, which serves as the driving force for filtration. Evaporated water is then condensed as drinkable water. The technology is enhanced by the use of graphene-oxide based nanomaterials that increase evaporation rates and augment passive water transport throughout the technology. This technology is being implemented in southern India to combat groundwater salinization that is causing widespread hypertension throughout urban areas.
Millions of homes waste enormous amounts of energy through needlessly heating water heaters which they do not always need. PowerTank wants to change this by integrating three simple, existing pieces of technology, adding machine learning, and unleashing the energy storage potential of things we already own. Consider this: a 50 gallon hot water tank with water at 150°F stores about 11 kWh of energy. And they already exist in millions of homes across the country. On the other hand, battery energy storage remains a niche market, and with an installed cost of around $400/kWh. The team believes that PowerTank can provide energy storage at a price an order of magnitude less than existing batteries, and can achieve scale far faster than batteries because they leverage existing assets that are already in homes. This technology can be installed by a professional in a less than 30 minutes, and saves the customer money through lower energy use, lower energy bills (particularly when on time-of-use rates), and shared payments for the grid services that the PowerTank provides.
The majority of low-income rural Indian communities still use kerosene for lighting purposes and haven’t made the switch to solar technology because of a high initial investment involved and lack of awareness. MakeGlow is a low-cost Do-It-Yourself solar lantern that addresses both these problems. MakeGlow is mainly intended for students from underserved schools in low-income rural Indian communities. As part of a MakeGlow learning activity integrated in the school curriculum, students will build their own MakeGlow solar lanterns out of cardboard and a kit of parts. This approach will teach students about the working and benefits of switching to solar, while providing them with the means to build a low-cost solar lantern. At the end of the class term, students will organize a sale where they’d sell their MakeGlows to people in their communities, at a very low cost. This also acts as an effective channel of distribution for solar.
Each year, over 4 billion pounds of citrus pulp waste are produced by the juicing industry in the USA and Brazil. This waste has caused significant disposal problems, but could be repurposed as a polymer to account for all the plastic bottles required by the orange juicing industry. The ZestBio Orange Bottle project is a synthetic biology effort that aims to convert citrus pulps and peels into plastics using eco-friendly conversion technologies. This project aims to give familiar wastes new life by fermenting them with highly engineered microbes that can produce chemicals normally produced from oil. Put your orange juice back in the peel with ZestBio plastics.
Current lighting and phone charging solutions in off-grid regions are hazardous, expensive, and inconvenient. The Low Cost Disposable Battery project addresses these major drawbacks using cheap and safe materials, representing a major shift in the way traditional batteries are made. Users will purchase and assemble the batteries themselves, replacing components as necessary. This solution puts the power in the hands of families, allowing them to personally control their power usage in the safety of their home, at all times of the day, and at a low cost.
Rapid modernization and industrialization in developing nations has significantly improved global standards of living at the expense of human health and the global environment. Air pollutants are now regarded as the most widespread carcinogen and lead to 7 million deaths worldwide annually. Project ViaeX aims to restrict human exposure to both indoor and outdoor air pollution while also providing clean air for people of all sectors of the society. ViaeX is developing a novel low-cost high efficiency nano filtration technology, which can remove 99.999% of all pollutants from the air with no end-of- life environmental impacts since the product is 100% biodegradable. This technology has the potential to transform air filtration into an affordable solution for everyone because it can be used to curtail air pollution at the source or at any point where humans may be exposed to it.
In 2013, a 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck Bohol, Philippines, destroying thousands of structures and displacing nearly 350,000 Boholanos. In response, the International Deaf Education Association (IDEA) employed several teams to build temporary homes using coconut wood boards. However, the homes only lasted two years before they were deemed uninhabitable due to extensive termite damage. IDEA identified the community’s need for economic and sustainable building materials, so they contacted Husk-to- Home to find a reliable solution. As the world’s seventh largest rice-producing country, the Philippines generates an abundance of termite-resistant rice husk waste. Husk-to- Home intends to capitalize on this termite resistance and design a particleboard that is lightweight, water-resistant, and of comparable strength to a commercially available medium-density particleboard. The project’s mission is to create a proof of concept building material composed of rice husk and an innovative binder. This will enable construction of durable homes for the Bohol Island community.
