A team of UI students, including first-year student Joel Donham, competed in the Environmental Protection Agency's Annual P3 (People, Prosperity, and the Planet) Award competition and won a prestigious Phase II Design Award at the National Sustainable Design Competition in Washington, D.C. The team's project is an inexpensive hand-crank powered electrolytic bleach generator targeted for developing countries around the world in need of drinking water disinfection options. The Phase II funding award of $75,000 will be used to further develop the team's small and inexpensive design. The project will culminate in the testing of the chlorinator by villagers in Haiti and/or Mexico.

According to the EPA website, "EPA and its 40 partners launched the P3 Award in 2004 to respond to the challenges of the developed and developing world in moving toward sustainability. This national competition enables college students to research, develop and design scientific, technical and policy solutions to sustainability challenges. Their designs are helping to achieve the mutual goals of economic prosperity while providing a higher quality of life and protecting the planet. Students and their faculty advisors compete for EPA's P3 Award and the opportunity of up to an additional $75,000 in funding to move their designs to the marketplace or implement them in the field."

More information is available on the EPA website.