Minister awards winners of the “Smart Solutions for the Environment” competition
Publikováno: 17.03.2011
The Ministry of the Environment in cooperation with the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic announced the results of the “Smart Solutions for the Environment” student innovation competition. Tomáš Chalupa, the Minister of the Environment, handed out certificates to the winners on the ground of the Czech Academy of Sciences together with its President, Jiří Drahoš, on 17 March 2011.
Five teams of students won the individual competition categories. The Ministry of the Environment will now award 100,000 crowns to each of these projects, which were found to be most interesting in terms of technology. The students will use this money to check the merits of their ideas and try to put them into practice.
Two category winners received an award from Minister of the Environment Tomáš Chalupa: Vojtěch Kundrát as the winner of the Talent of the Year competition with his project entitled “Enzymes in the Service of the Environment”, and a pair of students, Dong Nguyen Thanh and Ing. Hung Hoang Dieu, who became the Absolute Winners with their project entitled “Water without Carcinogenic Arsenic”.
“I’m pleased that the competition was so popular,” said Minister Chalupa in the introduction of his meeting with the winners. “We’ll do our best to organise another year of the competition where we could also look back at how this year’s winners managed to put their ideas into practice,” he added.
“The submitted projects were excellent in terms of great expertise and high-quality cooperation and I lift my hat to the winners,” added Jiří Drahoš, the President of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
The competition was announced by the Ministry of the Environment together with the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in November 2010. Its main objective was to find new talents and apply their thoughts and ideas to solutions to specific problems in the wider context of environmental protection.Students of secondary schools and universities were able to submit their ideas related to improvements in categories “Technologies for Water Treatment”, “Technologies for Emissions Reduction”, “Recycling of Material and Waste” and “Development of New Analytical Procedures for Detecting Pollutants”. The commission then evaluated the submitted projects in two rounds, focusing primarily on the useful benefit of an idea for environmental protection and its feasibility.