Celebrating innovation Member News July 2019 12 Engineers engage with our plastic problem As part of this year’s IET Global Challenge, teams of young professionals submitted their ideas on engineering solutions to plastic pollution in March. We’ve whittled down the entries to eight finalists, who are now preparing second- round entries. They’ll demonstrate their technical skills, creativity and business acumen in a project report, PowerPoint presentation and elevator pitch video, which will be considered by our judging panel, including partner organisations Greenpeace and GreenSeas Trust. Up for grabs is a £500 cash prize and an invitation to the IET Innovation Awards in November, where their solutions will be shared with top innovators, as well as the wider engineering and technology community. The challenges Partnering with Greenpeace and GreenSeas Trust, we set two challenges that teams could choose from. Greenpeace challenge Using new technologies, approaches and alternative delivery systems, teams had to come up with a way to help UK supermarkets reduce their overall use of plastic packaging. Their focus had to be on reusable packaging designs (which can be reused multiple times) or approaches which enable supermarkets to reduce their need for packaging altogether. GreenSeas challenge GreenSeas asked teams to create a remotely controlled all-terrain machine, capable of moving up and down the beach, picking up cigarette butts from the sand and collecting them in a chamber or hopper. The ideal machine had to be: –  large enough to collect a good amount of cigarette butts –  solar powered –  sand, salt and water resistant –  small, agile and intelligent enough to manoeuvre around obstacles –  big and bright enough to attract attention and help educate beachgoers on how careless disposal of cigarette butts is contributing to plastic pollution Beyond the IET Global Challenge… For many of our young professional members, tackling plastic pollution is part of the day job. Ludovic Grosjean CEng MIET, Young Professionals Section Chair of the Victoria Local Network, was named one of six Rotary-UN Young Innovators last November, for his efforts to clean plastic from the ocean. His business, OceanX Group, is developing technology to clean up the oceans. The Ocean CleanX project focuses on developing automated pollution monitoring and removal tools (such as artificial intelligence and drones) to remove plastics and other pollution from waterways and detect their source. Winning the Rotary award took Ludovic to the United Nations in Kenya, where he presented his work to an audience of 1,000 UN officials, philanthropists and Rotary members. YPCC Vice Chair Imran Ansari represented the IET at Scotland’s International Marine Conference in February. He chaired a session on innovative technology – being developed and in use – to reduce marine litter. He also led discussions on processes and levers to help get ideas off the ground. The finalists Greenpeace Challenge finalists: Team Kaboom, Team Leeds, Stagnate or Innovate and Team NanoMalaysia. GreenSeas Challenge finalists: RACE – Remote Applications for Cigarette Extraction, Baywatchers, BClean and Evergreen. We’ll be announcing the winners (one for each challenge) in September, so keep a look out for further communications on the winning teams and their solutions. This year’s Global Challenge focuses on plastic pollution in our oceans