By Line Jørgensen, AAU Esbjerg Communications

The DIN-ECO Innovation Competition is a student competition running in Denmark, Greece, Italy, Poland, Serbia, and Turkey with the purpose of bringing together students from different disciplines and identifying and supporting innovative business solutions in the fields of Digital Technologies, Digital Health, and Manufacturing. The competition is organised by the non-profit organisation DIN-ECO Project funded by the European Union.

The tree students Homero, Roland, and Magnus are all part of the same first semester project group at AAU Esbjerg. They decided to apply for the competition with their first semester project, a Microplastic Analyser and Locator for Automatic Collection at Sea.

Motivated by their supervisor

Magnus explains how their supervisor Mads Valentin Bram from Esbjerg Energy Section had motivated them to join the competition:

- He told us, that our project would be well suited for this competition because we already had a prototype made for it. With us being only at our first semester, it is not common to have already advanced so far as to making an actual prototype in the student workshop.

The inspiration for their semester project came from Esbjerg Harbour, who had wanted to collaborate with AAU Students about a number of semester projects. It sparked their interest in the problem of plastic waste polluting the oceans. Working with Esbjerg Harbour also meant that the group has made a lot of their work in the Sustainable Goals House GeinIn at Esbjerg Harbour.

Magnus explains that the object of their project was creating a sensor to detect plastic and microplastics in the oceans:

At the moment the sensor is in its early stages, but it has the opportunity of further development into detecting other materials e.g., oil spill.

Totally 73 groups entered their ideas into the competition by the start of December. The five best groups from each country (30 in total) were selected for the finals, which took place in the form of a 5-hour DIN-ECO Hackaton on 16 December including both workshops, talks, and pitching their innovative ideas to a panel of judges. In the category Digital Technologies, the AAU group was selected as winners among a field of 17 finalist.  

Magnus and his group are happy to receive the international award for pitching their innovative idea:

- It is nice to get recognition that what you are doing – already at first semester seems relevant to society and the industry. It is definitely motivating us.