Semi-Finalist Submissions

Last year, five ideas stood out and were presented to a panel of Canada’s top CEOs. With ideas ranging from the very complex, to the incredibly simple, the 2012 Green Student Challenge semi-finalists impressed the CEOs with their innovative ideas.

Here’s an idea of what it takes to make it to the finals of the Walmart Green Student Challenge.

Retail distribution centres are massive facilities that use an enormous amount of energy every day. This integrated energy hub will incorporate solar rooftop panels and be connected to a smart electricity grid to provide grid balancing and auxiliary services producing net economic benefits estimated at $1.35 million per year over 20 years.

Download:  Arthur_Yip_University_of_Waterloo.pdf

When it comes to the environment, sometimes even the smallest change can have a gigantic impact. Mark Desjardine proposes a strategy to adjust the interior temperature of retail buildings 1°C closer to the natural outdoor temperature. For Canadian businesses, this small adjustment amounts to a collective savings of 1.8 million tonnes of GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions and over $800 million every year.

Download:  Mark_DesJardine_University_of_Western_Ontario.pdf

More than 9,600,000 trees are cut down every year just to produce paper receipts. Capitalizing on the growing popularity of smart phones, this receipt app eliminates the need for waste-producing paper receipts by providing customers with electronic copies on their phones. This app will save trees and help customers keep track of their purchases while providing retailers with valuable customer data.

Download:  Stephanie_MacLean_Cape_Breton_University.pdf

Large amounts of energy are wasted daily in the electronics departments of retailers across Canada. Television displays are left on all day, using considerable amounts of electricity. Hassan Valiji came up with a simple solution to this problem: turn off displays when they are not being viewed by customers. By attaching the remote to the side of each display, customers will be able to turn on individual screens to see them in action.

Download:  Hassan_Valiji_York_University.pdf

OneBag is a customizable, reusable shopping bag that is also used to consolidate consumers’ loyalty cards from different retail outlets. By linking rewards to the bag, OneBag provides consumers with an incentive to remember their bags whenever and wherever they shop. The wide set of purchasing data. received by OneBag will be analyzed for valuable correlations, which will be provided for a fee to retailers and other clients

Download:  Peter_Waugh_University_of_Calgary.pdf