The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s People, Prosperity and the Planet (P3) Program
With ever-increasing energy, water and natural-resource consumption, as well as a rapidly growing population, Earth is facing challenges of an unprecedented magnitude. Therefore, action is required today to ensure a healthier environment and create a sustainable future for tomorrow. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s People, Posterity and the Planet (P3) is one of the agency’s programs working to achieve just that. Since 2004, the P3 program has been encouraging multidisciplinary teams of college and university students to tackle some of today’s most daunting challenges. By helping fund teams that focus on environmental challenges in developed and developing nations, the P3 Program provides support for the design of tangible, innovative technologies that can bring solutions to real-world problems.
The P3 grant competition has two phases. Phase I teams submit a proposal of their innovative idea for a grant of $15,000, which EPA awards in the fall. The winning Phase I teams then develop their designs throughout the school year, before bringing their design projects to the National Sustainable Design Expo, held every spring in the Washington, D.C., area. At the expo, students showcase their projects while they compete for a Phase II grant of up to $75,000. These Phase II grants give the teams the chance to further expand and improve their designs.
The P3 Program has four primary goals: engage and educate the next generation of scientists about sustainability; spark innovative and sustainable technologies; support the use of sustainable technologies around the world; and enable the formation of enterprises rooted in sustainability. To accomplish such goals while simultaneously supporting students to create palpable change, the P3 Program targets a number of broader categories. These include supporting the economy through small businesses and technology, laying a foundation upon which a clean energy campaign can be built, and urging students to actively create change in communities locally and abroad.
Since the program’s inception in 2004, more than 4,000 students from 217 institutions across all 50 states and Puerto Rico have taken part in the P3 competition and received 645 grants worth more than $13.5 million. They have authored almost 200 publications, received 15 patents, and created 28 small businesses and non-profits. Over the years, the P3 Program has generated inspirational success stories, a handful of which have been highlighted further. To learn more visit the P3 website.
Harvard University
The idea that blossomed into the vastly successful company, One Earth Designs, originated at Wellesley College—a liberal arts, women’s college located in Wellesley, Mass.—in 2009. It was here that Catlin Powers, currently the co-founder and CEO at One Earth Designs, was finishing her undergraduate degrees in Environmental Studies and Chemistry. After graduation, Catlin was accepted to the Harvard University School of Public Health, where she would spend the next five years receiving her M.S. and S.D. in Environmental Health.
During that time, Catlin traveled to western China to study climate change and air pollution in the Himalayas. While there, a native family asked her why scientists were studying the outdoor pollution when the real problem was the pollution inside their homes. After taking numerous measurements, Catlin discovered the indoor air the family was breathing was 10 times more polluted than the air in Beijing, and each year more than 4 million people die from breathing in toxic smoke created by their rudimentary cook stoves. Soon after, she changed the course of her research and her project; “A Comprehensive Platform for Rural Energy Optimization in the Himalayan Region” received a Phase I (2009-10) and Phase II (2010-12) award from the EPA P3 Program.
During Phase I, the P3-funded team worked to design, test and improve the SolSource cooker, which provides clean solar cooking for areas where fuel is scarce, such as for the nomads of the Himalayas. The SolSource heats up five times faster than a charcoal grill, can reach temperatures of up to 550 F (300 C), delivers up to 1,000 watts (1kW) of power and harnesses sunlight seven times more efficiently than an average photovoltaic solar panel. Furthermore, it captures sunlight at a 92 percent efficiency rate, protects the user’s eyes, is easily portable and has withstood more than 10 years of accelerated weather testing.
During Phase II, production increased and currently the device has been sold in more than 60 countries, received the fourth highest global impact rating ever awarded, and has been featured on “Top Chef”. Perhaps most impressively, One Earth Designs has been B Corp certified since December 2012 and has been one of the top five companies each year. The company also is the recipient of a number of other prestigious awards, including the Grand Prix du Public from the Geneva Inventions Competition, the St. Andrews Prize for the Environment and the 2014 Prize for Excellence in Clean Tech Commercialization.
One Earth Designs is currently hoping to enter the disaster-preparedness market.
University of Tennessee
The University of Tennessee’s Design Build + Evaluate Initiative states its project motto is to “apply the intellectual resources of the university to challenges in the built environment to achieve the highest levels of design excellence, environmental performance, and social responsibility while developing new knowledge and disseminating lessons learned to academic and professional peers.” Under this initiative, the University of Tennessee has had a number of innovative and successful projects, two of which received both Phase I and Phase II funding from the EPA P3 Program.
The initial University of Tennessee project to be granted an EPA P3 award was titled, “The New Norris House: A Sustainable Home for the 21st Century”. Through its 2008-09 Phase I and 2009-11 Phase II projects, a very multidisciplinary team (including students from six departments) designed and constructed a sustainable home and landscape in Norris, Tenn. This location was chosen because it is the site of a model community the Tennessee Valley Authority built in 1933 as part of the Norris Dam Project. The model community was one of the first planned communities in the U.S. and consisted of a series of homes built for modern, efficient living, originally integrating new technologies, such as municipal electricity and water systems.
The New Norris House was built to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Norris Project, and attempts to reinterpret the Norris example while designing a more modern home for the 21st century. As with the original Norris designs, the home created in this project utilized state-of-the-art technologies and techniques while using green and other sustainable materials in construction. Yet, the challenge went beyond simply designing a model home. The students had to confront and resolve not only technological or scientific concerns, but also legal, social, financial and aesthetic issues that currently restrict green construction, especially in towns registered as National Historic Districts.
The project was completed in August 2010, and since August 2011 it has served as host to educational programs and a one-year residency. Researchers measure the performance of the building and landscape systems while recording the experience of living in such a home, landscape and community. The New Norris House received a Platinum Certification from the LEED for Homes Program, which is the highest certification standard for homes recognized by the U.S. Green Building Council. It also won the 2012 Merit Award by the American Institute of Architects Gulf States Design Awards and the 2012 Award of Excellence from the American Institute of Architects Tennessee Design Awards. In 2013, The American Institute of Architects and its Committee on the Environment selected the New Norris House as one of 10 national recipients of its Top Ten Green Projects Award.
Oberlin College
The built environment is annually responsible for the use of two-thirds of U.S. electricity and over 15 trillion gallons of water. On college campuses, a significant percentage of total energy and water consumption takes place within dormitories. Knowing this, a team of students from Oberlin College decided to tackle the challenge of motivating building occupants to use fewer resources by implementing and assessing the effectiveness of a data monitoring and display system that enable real-time observation and interpretation of resource use.
To fund their research, the students applied to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s first annual P3 Award and received a 2004-05 Phase I grant for their project exploring “visual feedback systems.” The premise of their research was that publicly accessible feedback on resource use in buildings would inspire and empower students to behave in ways that minimize resource use, build knowledge and understanding, and generate environmental and financial benefits.
Through the course of the Phase I grant, the team successfully demonstrated that their low-cost, wireless, resource monitoring feedback system and web-based display system could stimulate interest and motivate college students to exhibit substantial short-term reductions in energy and water use in dormitories. This was clearly exhibited during a two-week “dorm energy” competition, where two dorms containing the resource-monitoring prototype reduced electricity use by 56 percent while dorms without this technology reduced electricity use by an average of only 13 percent.
Because of their success, the Oberlin team also received an inaugural P3 Phase II award for their 2005-07 project, which worked to scale up the technology and the evaluation of the impact to the level of campus-wide implementation. The success also led to the inception of Lucid Design Group in 2004, which was recently named a recipient of two EPA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards—a 2014 SBIR Phase I and 2015 SBIR Phase II award—for their project developing and testing novel “building orbs” that can help monitor and reduce electricity use.
Having been aptly re-named Lucid Connects, Lucid works to “connect people to buildings, empowering organizations to make smarter decisions that reduce costs, improve occupant comfort, and accelerate team productivity” by allowing businesses to access real-time energy consumption reports. Their software is currently being used by the cities of Chicago and Washington D.C., and they are backed by a number of powerful partners, including GE, Google, Autodesk, the Clinton Foundation, Energy Star, Berkeley Lab and the National Wildlife Federation. Lucid has received numerous awards, such as the Top Product of the Year 2015 in the inaugural Energy Manager Today Awards and an International Green Award (the “Green Oscars”) while also being named to the 2014 Global Cleantech 100.
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
In mid-January 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake rocked the small island nation of Haiti, causing devastating damage to an already weak infrastructure. As disaster relief poured in from around the globe, a group of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU) students decided to make sure that next time there was a natural disaster, the arduous recovery process would be slightly more manageable. Their drive led to them winning a 2011-12 EPA P3 Phase I award and a 2012-14 Phase II award for their “Portable Solar Water Purification System for Public Use during Disaster Recovery.”
Using their Phase I and II funding, the ERAU students developed a portable, solar-powered, water purification system in the form of a backpack–the Drop–capable of purifying an impressive 3 gallons of water a minute, which equates to about 4,300 gallons per day. This patented filtration technology provides up to 99.99 percent reduction for bacteria and viruses, as well as filters heavy metals, chemicals, bad taste and even smell from freshwater sources. All of this means that the produced water meets EPA and National Science Foundation drinking water standards. Not to mention, by purifying water onsite, thousands of dollars are saved in transportation, fuel and logistics, and plastic waste is reduced.
On average, the runtime on a single charge is up to 2 hours; the power source is a 120W foldable (collapsible) solar panel. The entire system weighs about 36 pounds, lighter than a 5 gallon bucket full of water. Furthermore, the Drop uses an impressive filter system where, over the course of their lifetime, the filters can replace up to 210,000 half-liter plastic water bottles.
Rather recently, AquaSolve Ventures was formed to expand the reach and effectiveness of the Drop. It also worked to commercialize a high volume, solar-powered, water purification system called the Pond, which costs less than $500 USD per year to maintain. The Pond works much in the same way as the Drop, but on a much larger scale, and has been installed in orphanages, missionary bases and community centers across Haiti. The systems provide the churches and orphanages with enough water for their daily operations and surplus water to sell to the community. These micro-businesses allow for the creation of jobs and generation of revenue to pay for system maintenance, as well as to start new programs.
AquaSolve Ventures and the work done by the ERAU students has been featured in a number of articles, they were the 2014 Cairns Foundation Innovation Challenge Winner, and they have won various awards including the 2012 U.S. Army NetZero Sustainability Award for Water.
Cornell University
AguaClara LLC is one of the most recent up-and-coming companies that was able to begin their preliminary research due to a P3 grant. Since 2005, students at Cornell University have been working to perfect their gravity-powered drinking water technology allowing them to target low-resource, high-need areas in developing countries. In 2009-10, the Cornell team was awarded an EPA P3 Phase I award to further improve a “Dose Controller for AguaClara Water Treatment Plants,” and followed that up with a 2010-12 Phase II award to continue their project.
Originally developed for low-income communities in Honduras that lacked access to reliable electricity and clean drinking water, AguaClara currently has 11 water treatment plants in 10 Honduran communities that provide clean water to nearly 50,000 people using technology powered by gravity, not electricity. Cornell’s gravity-powered filtration system contains five distinct steps: Grit Removal, Chemical Dose, Flocculation, Sedimentation and Filtration. Furthermore, they employ a detailed installation process for their full-scale projects that includes a feasibility study, design phase, comprehensive future employee training, and monitoring and evaluation.
This extensive and long-term project was inspired by the alarming facts that 1.3 billion people live with little or no access to electricity, making centralized water treatment practically impossible; 1.5 million people die from waterborne diseases every year, mostly children from diarrhea and the resulting dehydration; and more than 800 million people living in rural communities throughout the world have access to pipped in water that may be contaminated. Because of the success in Honduras, AguaClara expanded to India, and after over two years of hard work and determination, AguaClara handed over its first treatment plants in India to the communities of Gufu and Ronhe on Aug. 15, 2015.
Today, not only is AguaClara one of nearly 1,600 B Corp certified companies, but it was recently named to the B Corp “Best for the World 2015 List”, which recognizes companies “for overall, environmental, community and worker impact [and] for earning a score in the top 10% on the B Impact Assessment.” The B Corp Best for the World List honors companies creating the most impact for a better world, and the recently started for-profit, AguaClara, has been B Corp Certified since December 2014.
University of Virginia
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Elizabeth River Project, the non-profit dedicated to restoring the Elizabeth River, one of the most contaminated tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay, to its former glory. It also marks the seventh anniversary for The Learning Barge, a self-sufficient educational tool that has been dubbed “the world’s first floating wetland classroom and America’s greenest vessel.” However, the idea behind The Learning Barge formed a little over 10 years ago, when a group of University of Virginia students earned a 2006-07 EPA P3 Phase I grant for “The Learning Barge: A Self-Sufficient Environmental Education Field Station on the Elizabeth River.” They were also recipients of a 2007-09 Phase II grant to study “environmental and cultural ecologies on the Elizabeth River.”
Originally built for the Elizabeth River Project, The Learning Barge is completely powered by the sun and wind and features live wetlands that filter greywater and create habitat, an enclosed classroom, composting toilets and a rainwater filtration system. That being said, the 120- by 32-foot (3,840-square-foot) Learning Barge is designed to be a “steward ship,” teaching the next generation of future scientists that live nearby about environmental stewardship, ecology, and sustainability. Furthermore, the aim is to fulfill the goal of restoring the river and making it swimmable and fishable by 2020.
The Learning Barge is operated by the Elizabeth River Project and their partners, including several public school districts, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. It travels between four major cities while monitoring and teaching about ongoing sediment remediation, pollution prevention and restoration projects. The educational spaces and interactive exhibits provide meaningful, hands-on education about the tidal estuary ecology, restoration and remediation technologies and human impact on the Elizabeth River ecosystem. Approximately 55,000 students have been educated on the barge since its 2009 launch, with more than 20,000 being K-12 students.
The Learning Barge has won a number of awards since its inception, including the 2006 American Society of Landscape Architects National Student Collaborative Design Award, the 2008 AIA Education Award from the American Institute of Architects, the 2011 Sea World & Busch Gardens Environmental Excellence Award and was named a Top Project in the first UVA Sustainability Project Competition. Furthermore, it was recently named one of the state’s top 10 “Centers for Environmental Education Excellence” by the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation.