Grants to Design for Sustainability

Opportunity for Meredith Students/Faculty:
The EPA is announcing a unique grant opportunity for your department’s faculty and students - EPA's P3 - People, Prosperity and the Planet - Program. Through this design competition, student teams and their faculty advisors apply for $10,000 grants to design scientific, technical, and policy solutions to sustainability challenges in the developed or developing world.

The challenge addressed by these projects can be in any of these areas:
• water,
• energy,
• agriculture,
• built environment,
• materials & chemicals, or
• information technology.

Past P3 teams have explored more efficient ways to produce biofuels, developed simple water treatment technologies for developing communities, produced a technology to measure real-time energy use in buildings, reduced hazardous substance use in laboratories through improved information and purchasing practices, optimized a framework for stakeholder involvement in urban redevelopment, and much more. Teams use the $10,000 grants to design and develop their projects throughout the 2009/2010 school year. Then in the spring of 2010 all teams will come to Washington, DC, to compete for EPA's P3 Award at the 6th Annual National Sustainable Design Expo. The students' projects will be evaluated by a panel of experts in all relevant fields, including sustainability. EPA will use these recommendations to choose the P3 Award winners who will be eligible for an additional grant up to $75,000 to further develop their designs, implement them in the field, and take them to the marketplace.

Applications are due by December 23, 2008.