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Winners Awarded For GreenBlue's eDesign Competition
On May 14, 2004, winners of the "Cradle-to-Cradle Electronics Design Challenge" were announced at the 2004 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Symposium for Electronics and Environment in Scottsdale, Arizona. The contest was sponsored by the nonprofit organization, GreenBlue Institute, with support from EPA's Office of Solid Waste.
Contestants were challenged to reevaluate existing electronic product and system designs, and research alternatives for recovering and recycling materials at the end of product use. Entries were judged on their relevance to the goals of the competition, innovativeness, comprehensiveness, how they demonstrated cradle-to-cradle design characteristics, and how convincing the designs were compared to other entries.
Eighteen team and individual designs were submitted. The winners were:
First Place -"LINC", submitted by Brett Christie, a student at the University of Cincinnati. The design features a compact, solar powered handheld unit, replacing multiple electronic devices such as WiFI Internet, GPS Navigation, Movie and Music Players, and E-Book. Used LINC units can be returned to the manufacturer and recycled to create new LINC units;
Second Place - "Ecoprojection", submitted by Virginia Tech Students, Junko Hosokawa, Stuart Ottenritter, Hohn Gualtieri, and Michael Dickson. This design replaces ray tubes and plasma screen technologies in personal computers by using a full color laser to project images on a variety of surfaces. The design also includes a modular central processing unit with parts that can be taken out while the machine is still operating; thereby, allowing the parts to be sent back to the manufacturer for upgrading. This design highlights such materials as a releasable adhesive for printed circuit boards, and plastics and metals that return to their standard shape with minimal reprocessing, expediting the reuse of the materials.
Third Place - "bioPC", submitted by a team of University of Illinois students, Summer Hill, Pooja Goya, Joe Bradley, and Ben Shao, proposes the use of a bacterium [Bacteriorhodsin (BR)] for information storage. The personal computer is made from biodegradable plastic materials and designed to be returned to a municipal composting facility at the end of its life cycle.
First and second place winners each received $5,000, donated by Hewlett-Packard and IBM. The third place winner received $4,000, donated by Lexmark Corporation and the Consumer Electronics Association.
According to James Ewell, Program Director for GreenBlue Institute, "EPA's willingness to explore unconventional and creative approaches for stimulating innovation in industry, like GreenBlue's eDesign Competition, is very encouraging for nonprofit organizations who are also trying to find more effective ways to engage industry. Through EPA's grant, GreenBlue was able to reach an important audience - tomorrow's designers - to educate them about the issues of central concern to the electronics industry and to solicit a different perspective on some of these common problems. GreenBlue believes that when ecological intelligence is wedded with design, effective solutions can be realized."
