Two UF student teams win $10,000 EPA grants

December 3, 2008

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Two University of Florida teams received $10,000 grants from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to develop sustainability projects at opposite ends of the Earth: improving a reservoir that purifies stored rainfall for the village of Sissene, Burkina Faso, in Western Africa and measuring cellulosic ethanol production made from Florida pine forests.

The grants are part of the EPA’s People, Prosperity and the Planet (P3) program, which provides key technical assistance in moving both the developed and developing worlds toward sustainability. The program is divided into two phases. The UF teams received Phase I grants to develop their proposed design projects during the academic year. Then, the teams will travel to Washington D.C. in the spring to compete for the Phase II additional funding of $75,000 each to implement their projects in the field and move them to the marketplace. The EPA awarded 43 Phase I P3 grants this year for a total of $890,000 to student teams representing 40 universities in 24 states.

The first UF project, “Water Capture and Filtration System: A Replicable Design Concept for Arid Rural Communities,” proposes a design for a low-tech, low-cost system that improves upon a standard open-pool reservoir design to purify about 2 million gallons of stored rainfall year round in Sissene. Like many rural villages in West Africa, Sissene faces a lack of access to water that has led to hunger, poverty, high rates of child and maternal mortality and the spread of infectious diseases. The student design, which relies solely on solar energy and gravity, eliminates most evaporation, installs a system to filter rain and collected water and distributes water for irrigation and household use. With these improvements, residents will no longer have to rely on the underground aquifer to meet their water needs, relieving a significant amount of pressure from the natural environment and providing access to water throughout the year.

“For the residents, this project provides access to water year-round to help increase food supplies by creating a more stable environment for farming,” said Iris Patten, the design, construction and planning doctoral student who initiated the project after working with Community Building Group Ltd. in Tampa, which built the village’s original reservoir. “For us students and industry professionals, the project shows how we can use the principles of conservation and the relationship between health and the built environment to impact real-life situations and people — in this case, an entire village of people.”

The other members of Patten’s team are Christen Hutton, John November, Alex Sommer and Robert Weaver. The team’s faculty adviser and principal investigator is Joseli Macedo, assistant professor and undergraduate coordinator for the Department of Urban and Regional Planning in the College of Design, Construction and Planning.

The second UF project, “Developing Indicators for Measuring the Sustainability of Bioenergy Products Derived from Pine Forests in U.S. South,” proposes a basic framework to measure the sustainability of bioenergy production, specifically cellulosic ethanol made from Florida pine forests, in four areas: economic, biodiversity, greenhouse gas emission reduction and net energy ratio, and soil and water quality.

For information about the P3 program, this year’s winners and next year’s competition topic, visit http://es.epa.gov/ncer/p3/.