The rapidly changing environmental climate calls for our youth to understand the urgency of addressing sustainability challenges and to innovate for a sustainable future. The Young Innovators Challenge, supported by The Chua Thian Poh Entrepreneurship Education Fund, is a series of innovation - education programmes comprising masterclasses, ideation, prototyping, coaching and competition. It looks towards collaborative efforts with industry experts, government agencies and academic partners to provide Singapore’s younger generation with the opportunity to take on active roles and empower them to come up with innovative ideas and solutions for creating a better sustainable future for all.
SST is represented by 2 teams of students in the 2YIC 2022.
Team Mycelium (Finalists)
Lam Ke Xin, Lim Xuan Wei Joel, Pey Ruo-Yu, Ang Yew Shuen (S4-04)
After a natural disaster, victims live in temporary shelters until they can find permanent housing. Most models do not last beyond 1 year, which could be insufficient for victims to get back on their feet. The construction of temporary shelters takes 70-200 days. Furthermore, attaining miscellaneous permits takes time. In total, the process could take up to 10 months to build non-modular short term housing. In line with UN sustainable goals 9, Industry, innovation and infrastructure, our solution is to use mycelium blocks as a building material to create temporary shelters.
Mycelium is extremely lightweight, 43 kg per cubic metre, comparative to 2400 kg for concrete and can be produced quickly, however it is not as strong, at 1 mPa, relative to ~10 mPa for concrete. Given this, it still has a much higher strength-to-density ratio and can be combined with other materials to form composites or reinforced with other materials to increase strength. Production is simple; collect material through homogenisation, sterilisation to kill bacteria, grow in moulds, dehydration to kill off fungus and create a rigid material.
In theory, houses look like this. Based on pre-existing structures in 6 countries, the average size of a one-room temporary shelter is 20.24m2, comparable to the container houses used in Japan and South Korea, 19.86m2 and 20.00m2 respectively. The Japanese design was used as they have a standardised format and dimensions. Standard shipping container height (2.60m) is used for calculation. When victims relocate to permanent housing, the mycelium can be used as a soil compound for the previously devastated land. It has higher salt content and is beneficial for crops.
Treasure
Angel Phan Li Hui (S3-03), Anjali Curic (S3-05), Chang Yu Qian Cheryl (S3-02), Galistan Anastasia Nathasha Phatthra (S3-06)
When disposed of through improper methods such as incineration, e-waste releases harmful chemicals such as mercury into the atmosphere. Thus, many turn to recycling as a method to deal with e-waste. However, although more than 300 e-waste bins have been deployed at various locations around Singapore, they are not used extensively. We looked at why was this so. We concluded that e-waste bins are not easily locatable, and Singaporeans simply do not make the effort to do a cursory google search to find one, instead throwing their e-waste in the chute. We aim to make use of e-waste bins more convenient, incentivising more to do so.
To carry out this task, we developed Treasure, an app which shows users nearby e-waste bins to promote recycling. Users launch the app, and it shows a map with e-waste bins near their location. Treasure also features ongoing or upcoming donation drives to inform users that there are ways to reuse their old products and point them in the right direction to do so. FAQs about e-waste disposal are also answered in the app.
The data on where to locate e-waste bins was taken from the NEA (2021) website. It was downloaded as a xml file then converted to CSV and cleaned before being plotted in Apple Maps. We have visited some of the locations in the file and have verified that there are e-waste bins located there. Our team aims to launch a beta version of Treasure by March 2022 and have set a goal of 700 users by August 2022. We hope that you will support us in our efforts.
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