The winners of the IET Global Challenge have been announced. This year’s competition, open to students and professionals aged 18-35, was themed ‘Save our Seas’, with challenges set by the Green Seas Trust and Greenpeace. The Green Seas Trust focused on tackling the trillions of cigarettes that are currently in the sea, whilst the Greenpeace task looked at reusable packaging options for supermarkets.
Three of the four finalists in the Green Seas Trust challenge were teams from UKAEA, with one of them coming up with the winning idea – the KRABB-E, a crab-like robot designed to pick up cigarette butts from the beach.
The winning team, the Baywatchers, were made up of Helena Livesey, Jonathon Witty, George Fulton and Alexander Morgan. On finding out the news, Helena said:
“We wanted to enter as we thought the challenge could have a real positive and global impact and we’re delighted to have won! We were quite surprised but glad all of our hard work has paid off. Engineering and technology is so vital to help tackle environmental change – we can use it to fix problems that we’ve already caused – like with the use of KRABB-E – but also to monitor and inform new technologies, helping to change behaviours and how we interact with our environment.”
Rob Buckingham, Head of RACE added:
“We are incredibly proud of the three teams that made the final of this prestigious award. It demonstrates the strength and depth of the young people working at RACE and across UKAEA. I would also like to congratulate the Baywatchers team. Their winning solution could make a significant difference to a global problem.”
