2015 Winners
Sustainable thinking on campus took centre stage this year, as winners of the 2015 Western’s Ideas for Sustainability and the Environment (WISE) competition brought new insights to old problems.
Launched in the fall of 2014, WISE asks students to come up with innovative and high-impact ideas to reduce – or even eliminate – some of today’s most pressing environmental concerns. In its inaugural year, the competition aims to generate ideas and initiatives among Western’s students around the topic of sustainability, and officially recognize the winning ideas.
Announced Tuesday, March 31st WISE winners included Soojeong Choe, Undergraduate Category; Tarek Rashwan, Graduate Category co-winner; and Margaret Liu, Lina Sherazy and Rei Ahn, Graduate Category co-winners.
Soojeong Choe
WISE Award, Undergraduate Category
Medical Sciences student Soojeong Choe aims to save 4 million pounds of paper from entering landfills through his Greenline Program. Inspired by projects like the High Occupancy Vehicle Lane and Disneyland FASTPASS, Greenline redesigns customer lineups to promote the use of tumblers and reusable mugs by dedicating one cash register at every Starbucks, for instance, toward green customers who bring their own mug.
Tarek Rashwan
WISE Award, Graduate Category co-winner
Engineering graduate student Tarek Rashwan provided experimental evidence to support the technical efficacy of STARx, a patented and patent pending technology, using smouldering combustion, as a sustainable means for biosolids disposal. The solution has huge financial savings implications for wastewater treatment plants.
Lina Sherazy, Margaret Liu and Rei Ahn
WISE Award, Graduate Category co-winners
The trio aims to promote a concept of ‘sustainable consumerism’ through encouraging the purchase and exchange of used clothing. Their thought is, the creation of a pop-up campus thrift store, selling fashionable quality clothing, will help mitigate the consumerist society we live in.
