Over the weekend of January 24–25, undergraduate engineering students competed in the Clarke Prize Environmental Design Challenge: a two-day competition hosted by ISTEP where participants developed and proposed innovative solutions to real-world environmental problems.

On the first day, teams attended learning and team-building workshops that prepared them for the challenge to come. In the afternoon, they were given their scope and objectives: design a sustainability engagement strategy for the City of Toronto, based on findings from official city reports, while considering environmental impacts for both individuals and communities.

Teams spent the next day refining their ideas into actionable solution designs. In spite of an intense snowstorm forcing the competition’s second day to be held online, participants remained undeterred, knowing what was at stake. 

Lucrative cash prizes awaited the top three teams: $10,000, $7,000, and $5,000 for first, second, and third places, respectively, pushing every participant to perform to the best of their abilities. For the rest of the attendees, the competition showcased what sustainability projects can look like on a smaller scale. At this level, ambitious and imaginative students can learn about sustainability and the unique challenges of addressing real-world environmental issues.

In the afternoon of day two, the five finalist teams presented their design solutions to a panel of three judges. After deliberating, the judges announced the top three teams for this year’s Clarke Prize. The Varsity attended the finalists’ presentations to see what revolutionary ideas the next generation of engineers had in store.

Third place: Toronto Heat-Sync

Taking third place and winning $5,000 were Eco-nomic Five — consisting of industrial engineering student Fiona Sun, mechanical engineering students Jingzhe Zhang, Yusra Chowdhury, and Lulu Zhang, led by mechanical engineering student Niki Bidhendi. They began their presentation with a shocking fact: buildings are Toronto’s biggest polluters, generating 55 per cent of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2023. 

The team identified a ‘deadlock’ between tenants and landlords as the primary barrier preventing buildings from adopting green energy. Tenants want lower bills and clean energy, but only landlords have the authority to make renovations — and they have no incentives to do so.

To break this stalemate, Eco-nomic Five proposed Toronto Heat-Sync, a provincial-level economic policy that would incentivize using Canadian technology to retrofit buildings for green energy. Their policy would fine emitters at different rates based on their emission intensity and the type of building owned, echoing similar cap and trade policies used by the federal government. 

The fines would be set higher than green energy retrofitting costs, making renewable energy investments the cheaper option for landlords. To incentivize developers to construct net-zero buildings — structures that meet their energy demands entirely using on-site renewable energy — the policy would grant developers higher density and taller buildings during construction for developers who pledge to follow this policy.

Proceeds collected from the fines would funnel into a “residential retrofit fund” that covers the capital costs for green energy retrofitting. This policy would also protect tenants from being overcharged by requiring energy utility scores and expected costs to be visible on listed properties. Funding approval for retrofits would also include legal specifications to block evictions and freeze rent during renovations, ensuring tenants gain the benefits of low-carbon housing typically reserved for luxury homeowners.

Second place: ReBalanceTO

Taking second place and winning $7,000 was Team Catalyst, led by computer engineering student Dalia Mahidashti, alongside engineering science student Kevin Chen, computer engineering student Simran Raina, and civil engineering student Sophie Costantino. In their presentation, they highlighted inequities in Toronto’s bikeshare system, noting a lack of bike access in Toronto’s working-class neighbourhoods, where public transit is not frequent enough to be a practical option.

To tackle this inequity, Team Catalyst proposed ReBalanceTO, a ready-to-implement and community-driven bike redistribution program that would pay riders to redistribute bikes from oversupplied to underserved areas. The system would encourage residents in underserved areas to use bikes more often, generate revenue streams for lower-income residents, increase bike availability, and reduce bikeshare programs’ reliance on diesel trucks for redistributing bikes.

Referencing the successful business model of Bike Angels — New York City’s bike redistribution program — Team Catalyst made a compelling argument to justify ReBalanceTO’s feasibility, backed by the success of an existing program. To emphasize how their solution could be rapidly implemented, Team Catalyst also gave a demo of ReBalanceTO’s phone app, illustrating how bike riders could register and interact with their program.

First place: PowerRide

In first place and taking home the $10,000 grand prize was Team GeoGems, composed of Milena Gega, Min-Jae Hwang, Jeslyn Winoto, Jennifer Wu, and team lead Noor Sheikh, all of whom are chemical engineering students. In their presentation, Team GeoGems argued that the cost of electric vehicles impedes Toronto’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Their winning proposal was PowerRide, a brilliant solution promoting public transit usage while simultaneously providing a new clean energy source. PowerRide would consist of a fleet of electric buses operated by the TTC, charged using the power grid’s renewable energy sources during off-peak hours. 

Beyond transportation, the PowerRide fleet would also serve as a mobile energy source, providing electricity to neighbourhoods in need. Using vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, buses would be able to transfer stored energy back to local power grids during peak demand hours, providing energy relief and directing attention to lower-income neighbourhoods. To promote community engagement, PowerRide would pair its electric bus fleet with a PRESTO card partnership, letting riders earn reward points towards free rides on the TTC.

Team GeoGems justified their solution design with strong, data-driven arguments, providing a thorough financial breakdown of their solution’s costs and forecasting the energy generated as well as the money saved for Toronto residents. To punctuate their design’s feasibility, the team also referenced a similar V2G school bus project in BC.

Are sustainability competitions valuable?

Sustainability competitions like the Clarke Prize transform ambition and creativity into actionable ideas, providing much-needed optimism for the field. They create the perfect environment for young students to formulate ingenious ideas while working within real constraints and having to justify those ideas using evidence, compelling arguments, and captivating presentations. With the bulk of the work done in these competitions, finding the right support is all that is left for these ideas to become a reality.

Having worked with sustainability projects and policies during an undergraduate internship, I saw firsthand how fragile federal-level sustainability efforts can be. When political priorities shift or funding is reallocated, entire projects can be discontinued, regardless of the time and resources invested. Naturally, this undermines the long-term impact of many green initiatives, fueling pessimistic attitudes towards sustainability.

In contrast, sustainability competitions for university students are scoped down to the municipal or institutional level. This is chosen deliberately: a narrower scope means projects are easier to launch, maintain, and more likely to remain in place to make a real impact. 

By tying this year’s theme to official Toronto sustainability reports, the Clarke Prize made participants apply their engineering knowledge to the real world, creating a direct connection to everyday people who are often key stakeholders in sustainability projects, and helping participants develop practical engineering experience for their careers.

All students, regardless of their program, can benefit from the practical experience that sustainability competitions provide. Expanding competitions like the Clarke Prize beyond engineering would reinforce U of T’s commitment to sustainability, give more students the opportunity to do meaningful work, and most importantly, expand the diversity of perspectives in environmental problem-solving.