Two engineering student teams net EPA P3 Awards

Two student teams from the University of Illinois were awarded $75,000 grants as part of the 7th annual EPA People, Prosperity and the Planet (P3) award competition held in Washington, D.C.

In the competition, 55 competing teams from universities around the nation presented their sustainable projects designed to protect the environment, encourage economic growth and use natural resources more efficiently.

Following two days of judging by a panel of national experts convened by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, six teams were awarded grants to further develop their project, implement it in the field and move it to the marketplace.

The two winning Illinois teams both had their projects revolve around water. A student team advised by civil and environmental engineering (CEE) professor Charles Werth is developing a new sustainable water filtration system using bone char, while a team advised by Brian Lilly, a lecturer at the Technology Entrepreneur Center, is designing a solar-powered water collection, containment and self-regulating distribution system.

Werth’s student team, the “Oglala Lakota Water Project,” is specifically developing a water filtration system for the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, which is one of the poorest reservations in the country. Most homes on the reservation rely on private wells for water, and studies indicate that there are significant levels of arsenic and uranium are in the reservation’s groundwater. 

Though there are a variety of methods to remove such metals from the water, most are relatively expensive, require an expert to maintain, and/or don't make use of indigenous materials. The Oglala Lakota Water Project is looking to take bone char from local cattle operations and use the absorbent biomaterial to efficiently remove arsenic and uranium from the groundwater.

Illinois students first began working on the project in the summer of 2009, when Oglala Lakota College requested assistance from the University of Illinois-based WaterCAMPWS, the Center of Advanced Materials for the Purification of Water with Systems. The group is led by Alex Llewellyn, a senior in chemical and biomolecular engineering, with civil and environmental engineering senior Kim Parker as co-leader. Thirteen other undergraduates from several disciplines complete the group.

The solar-powered planter watering system developed by Lilly’s team hopes to reduce the labor and carbon footprint currently associated with planter watering. In 2009, over 40 million pounds of carbon dioxide were released while watering larger planters. Additionally, more than 364 million gallons of water are used annually to maintain their health.

The solar-powered watering system allows for onsite water storage with efficiently regulated onsite watering, which the team says can reduce planter maintenance costs and associated vehicle emissions by up to 90 percent, while also leading to a large reduction in required water.

The result, the team says, would lead to cleaner air in the environment while also saving municipalities millions of dollars annually. The team will be working with the University of Illinois grounds keeping department to conduct their research.

A third Illinois team, advised by CEE Professor Benito Mariñas, won an honorable mention for their project, "Sustainable Agriculture for the Water Catchment Protection Area in Ntisaw, Cameroon." 
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Contact: Kim Parker, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Writers: Celeste Arbogast Bragorgos, director of communications, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Jay Lee, Enginering Communications Office.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.