UST students win MMDA Manila Bay cleanup solutions contest

MANILA, Philippines—How do you clean up a heavily littered and polluted coastline? With a giant ‘dustpan,’ that’s how.

This is the simple premise behind an engineering contraption designed by two University of Santo Tomas students  who won the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority’s Manila Bay Cleanup Competition on Friday.

The contest, launched last April, challenged students to think up of “innovative engineering solutions to the Manila Bay garbage problem,” which may eventually be prototyped by the MMDA.

Fourth-year Electronic Communications Engineering students John Beljoe Abao and Ariel Manalaysay bested a total of 11 other designs from seven schools in the metropolis, and received a P25,000 cash prize, on top of a P5,000 prize for being finalists.

The UST students’ design involved the construction of concrete V-shaped seawalls with a tube in the middle, leading to an underground garbage containment tank where the trash could be extracted in bulk.

The design relies on “big waves” or strong tidal force to sweep floating debris up the wall and into the chute and tank.

Abao said the “simple logic” behind the contraption was based on sheer imagination.

During the final presentation of the top six ideas beside Roxas Boulevard in Manila on Friday afternoon, with a panel of judges from the MMDA, the Departments of Public Works and Highways, the Department of Science and Technology, and the Manila government, Manalaysay admitted the design was basically “like a dustpan.”

“It collects the trash into a bin,” he said.

From the tank, the garbage could be harvested through a net, or through the DPWH “scraper” already being used in cleaning up sewers, Abao said.

“It is made of concrete so it can withstand natural calamities. Its simple design makes it easy to implement. It’s low in maintenance because it has no moving parts or automation. The only manual labor required is during extraction,” Abao said.

He admitted, however, that the design in itself had no capability of treating chemicals in the water.

Public Works Assistant Secretary Maria Catalina Cabral, who led the panel of judges, said that in choosing the winning design, they looked for “innovation and engineering.”

The entries were judged 60 percent on innovation, 30 percent on implementation feasibility, and 10 percent on the clear presentation of the idea.

“The concept is doable. We saw there was potential for this to be built and developed. MMDA and DOST will make more studies to develop and make more improvements on this proposal,” Cabral said of Abao and Manalaysay’s design.

The panel of judges  made some initial suggestions after Abao and Manalaysay’s presentation, such as the use of steel reinforcement on the structure, or making the structure “collapsible” and transferable instead of permanent, and to put a flap check valve at the mouth of the chute to prevent backflow.

Overall, however, Cabral was impressed by the contestants. “The youth today are truly skilled. When you graduate, you’re welcome to apply in government agencies,” she told them, before she announced the winning design.

The other finalists included a proposal to use biosorpents —”biological materials that are known to remove heavy metals from the environment”— by the Ateneo de Manila University students; “The Flushmaster” and “The Groovemaster” to mechanically suck or scoop out floating garbage into a containment barge, designed by students of the University of the Philippines-Diliman; Manuel L. Quezon students’ V-shaped River Gate Fence to trap floating trash to the sides of a river; and Mapua Institute of Technology students’ Clean Bay Rover.

MMDA chair Francis Tolentino said, “We can merge the other ideas [with the winning idea]. All your ideas were good.”

Students from the Eulogio “Amang” Rodriguez Institute of Science and Technology and the Technological Institute of the Philippines submitted concept papers, but did not make it to the final cut.

Nevertheless, Tolentino said in a statement that he was pleased with the youths’ participation. “It only showed their concern to help in addressing our environmental problems,” he said.