Three teams of HKUST engineering undergraduate students recently joined the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers (HKIE) Joint Institutes Competition and were awarded with the Gold Award, Silver Award and Merit Award respectively.

A total of 14 teams from various local institutes competed in the Competition under the theme of “Shape our Sustainable Campus”. It aimed to raise the awareness on the importance of sustainability among students. The team “CBME”, formed by a group of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering students Jeromy Chun Yuen CHAN, Lawrence Kai Qi YAN, Karen Pik Shuen HUNG and Ho Sang MAK, won the Gold Award with the topic “Food Cycling: A Growing Future on HKUST Sustainability”. In their project, they developed a plan to convert food leftover into fertilizers and make use of the currently empty rooftop on the academic buildings and the dormitory on HKUST campus to obtain extra spaces for farmlands.

The other teams “Fisher”, formed individually by Fisher Ye YU, won the Silver Award with the project “Sea Water Cooling System” while “Green Piece”, formed by Ming Kin KWOK and Lai Ping WONG, received the Merit Award with their project “Paper Recycle Reward Scheme”. All three students are from the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering.

The HKIE Joint Institutes Competition was held in Spring 2012. It was organized by the Young Members Committee of The HKIE and The HKIE Student Chapters of four institutes, namely City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education (Sha Tin), Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education (Tsing Yi) and The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The Competition seeks to encourage engineering students to apply their knowledge from their own disciplines and enable them to develop engineering interests. The panel of judges consists of senior members from HKIE. Judging criteria include sustainability, innovation, feasibility, organization, technicality and cost-effectiveness.