Eton College Students Chosen as Earth Prize 2024 Finalists

Written by: Thomas G. (Year 11), Eton College

The 10 finalist teams in the annual Earth Prize competition have been announced and two of them are from Eton College. The Earth Prize is an annual, global competition for students between the ages of 13 and 19, who work in school-based teams to design projects to address environmental and sustainability issues. Some 10,000 students from more than 2000 schools in 151 countries have participated.

Eton’s Team Mycoflo is one of the finalists. The team is tackling the problem of water pollution in the Niger River basin due to oil extraction, heavy metals mining, and industrial and agricultural run-off. These contaminants poison water sources, threatening ecosystems and human health. Commercial water-quality technologies are often unavailable, so the team has devised “Mycofiltration”, using fungi to filter water. Their “MycoSacks”, composed of native Pleurotus tuber-regium spores and organic materials, remove pollutants. The system includes a diagnostic framework and a “MycoBot” robot, equipped with Al. In testing, Team Mycoflo’s design has achieved cost-effective water filtration and safe drinking water.

Team Mycoflo member Michael W. said, “Our innovative solution integrates the filtration properties of mycelial technology with machine learning to diagnose and cure areas with high levels of water contamination.” 

Improving the efficiency and lowering the carbon emissions of high-powered computing is the goal of Eton’s other finalist, Team Pebble. The boys’ research revealed that, worldwide, the manufacturing and powering of consumer graphics cards (GPUs) contribute to excessive energy and rare earth metals consumption, and yet most GPUs (in individual computers) are under-utilized. GPUs are essential to machine learning, especially Al training. Right now, AI developers rent out GPUs from big tech cloud centers, despite the high carbon emissions that result. Team Pebble’s solution is to pool under-utilized GPUs into a network. Their platform enables contributors to rent out their individual computers, optimising resource usage, improving access to high-powered computing, and saving 8.76 billion kilowatt hours annually.

Orlando W. and Koza K. of Team Pebble summed up, “Our project provides an environmentally friendly option for renting GPUs, aiming to cut the impact of these large centers, especially in the age of a large AI revolution, where this issue will exponentially worsen.”