The POWER Idea Contest for Sustainable Communities looked for innovative solutions to local water and sustainability issues between September 2018 and June 2019. More than 140 ideas were submitted to the POWER platforms of the cities Leicester, Milton Keynes, Sabadell and Jerusalem. After a community voting and a jury selection, 10 winning projects were selected. Now their authors will be invited to the POWER conference in Brussels in October 2019 to pitch their ideas to a high-end audience of sustainability and innovation experts who will support them in the further developments of their projects. 

See the winning projects and give them feedback in the comment section below to help them prepare better for the pitch at the POWER conference. Tell them what you like about their projects and where you see potential for further improvement. If your feedback comment gets popular among the POWER community and gets more likes and replies, you can become one of 10 people to win the DROP! interactive board game on water. 

INCOVER (Sabadell)

Taking into account the current global water scarcity and the expensive operation and maintenance cost of wastewater treatment, INCOVER concept has been designed to move wastewater treatment from being primarily a sanitation technology towards a bio-product recovery industry and a recycled water supplier.

Three added-value plants treating wastewater (municipalities, farms and food and beverage industries) at three demonstration sites will be implemented, assessed and optimised concurrently. INCOVER plants will be implemented at demonstration scale in order to achieve Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of 7-8 to ensure straightforward up scaling to 100,000 population equivalents (PE).

New Old Trend (Sabadell)

New-old trend is an online platform that connects people who want to give-away their clothes with people who want to give a second life to these clothes. As 700 gallons of water is needed to produce a single T-Shirt and only 20% of textiles globally are recycled, the platform aims at offering a more sustainable way of consumption and thus reducing  the amount of water used for clothes production.

Flood Simulation Caravan (Leicester)  

Flood Simulation Caravan is an innovative education tool that would teach children in a fun, interactive way; whether their area is in high-risk, what could they do to be prepared against flooding and what they could do in an actual case of flooding. 

Students through means of virtual reality simulation will encounter a situation where the area they live is affected and they need to take immediate action! 

ROTH20 (Leicester)

RotH2O is a special roundabout that exploits the underground unused space of the roundabout to harvest rainwater, consequently preventing road flooding caused by extreme precipitation events. 

Thanks to a water tank placed under the normal roundabout, water is collected and can be reused depending on the neighbourhood needs (i.e. landscaping, cleaning the road, extinguishing fires, groundwater recharge). 

The aboveground portion of the roundabout is covered by vegetation that will help in preventing the urban heat island effect, reducing pollution and creating a small urban biodiversity hotspot.

TreeSPot (Leicester)

TreeSpot is a mobile smart educative tree that raises awareness about the imapacts of climate change and urban environment on people's health. It shows ways to improve our cities and environments and by doing so - to improve our health.

BuYo (Leicester)

The BuYo team aims at using buoy generator(s) to create self-sustainable open offices on the river bank (in Leicester). The generator converts kinetic energy of river stream into domestically applicable electricity via trapping the waves of the flow, thus producing enough power to meet the needs of such office facilities. 

Bachreinigung (brook cleaning - BUND Frankfurt-Nord) (Leicester)

Bachreiningung is an initiative of BUND Northern Frankfurt-Main that aims and organizing voluntary brook cleaning actions to collect disposed waste and rubbish from the riverside. The organization started in 2017.

Drip (Milton Keynes)

Drip is an app that aims at fostering sustainable water usage by showing users their water consumption rates in real-time - no matter if they are at home, at work, at school etc. The app is connected to sensors installed in machines and water-consuming facilities (showers, toilets etc.) to immediately indicate and measure the water-usage of a person. The app uses gamification methods and rewards to stimulate people to reduce their water consumption.

WeHelpGreen (Milton Keynes)

WeHelpGreen is an app that tries to change user behavior towards more sustainable water consumption. The app combines several different approaches to stimulate users to save water: by using gamified elements that award users for the amount of saved water; by allowing users to share their water-saving achievements with their friends and network; by enableing users to be part of different communities and engage within these communities water-saving-related topics.  The app promotes competence-building for sustainable waer consumption in a fun and engaging way. 

DIAGNOSIS (Don't Ignore Any Get-away Neither Other Scape-system Is Solution) (Jerusalem)

DIAGNOSIS suggests a smart solution to the water scarcity and conservation problem in Jerusalem: installing smart-meters in the building in the city and connecting them to a map that visualizes the water consumption rates of each building. 

The map will not only help people monitor their water consumption and compare it to the averages in their area, but will also be used to diagnose and control areas with excessive water consumption. 

Give feedback to the winners in the comment section below and help them prepare better for their pitches oin Brussels. Tell them what you liked about their ideas and where you think they could improve. If your feedback comment is among the 10 most popular ones, you will get one of the 10 DROP! interactive board games that will help you learn about water sustainability in a fun way.

For the feedback comment to become popular, please share the link to your feedback comment in your personal network and ask your friends to like it and reply to it. 

Give your feedback by latest October 1, 2019 to be eligible for the award of the DROP! game.