Filipino bags award for creating usable energy from rotting fruits, veggies

London - Carvey Ehren Maigue wins James Dyson award for his clean energy technology.

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James Dyson (second right) offers budding inventors a chance to make a name for themselves. (Supplied picture)
James Dyson (second right) offers budding inventors a chance to make a name for themselves. (Supplied picture)

Published: Thu 19 Nov 2020, 7:44 PM

Last updated: Thu 19 Nov 2020, 8:42 PM

Carvey Ehren Maigue, a 27-year-old Filipino engineer from Mapua University in Manila has become the winner of the first-ever 'sustainability' prize in the James Dyson Award 2020.

He invented a florescent material made out of waste fruit and vegetables that was used to harvest light which was converted to electricity. His innovative method, called Aureus, uses up-cycled crop waste which can be attached to the sides of buildings to harvest invisible ultraviolet light from the sun.


The translucent material is mouldable and durable and it can also combat the issue of fruit and vegetable waste, which contributes to almost half of the food wasted by households, according to a report on Mail Online.

The award was founded by British inventor and billionaire, James Dyson and was instituted to celebrate, encourage and inspire the next generation of design engineers. It's open to current and recent design engineering students and is run by the James Dyson Foundation, Dyson’s charitable trust, as part of its mission to get young people excited about design engineering.


2020 marked a record-breaking year for the James Dyson Award, with the highest number of entries ever submitted and largest amount of prize money given to inventors. The international winner and, for the first time, the sustainability winner received £30,000 to help develop his inventions.

“'I understood that even when it's cloudy and rainy, ultraviolet light still reaches us…Winning the James Dyson Award is both a beginning and an end – it marked the end of years of doubting whether my idea would find global relevance,” Maigue was quoted as saying by Mail Online.

Solar energy is one of the best alternatives for fossil energy sources. If humans use fossil fuels at the current rate, supplies of gas and oil will deplete by 2060, the report stated.

“As a farmer, I see great potential in Carvey's technology to generate clean renewable energy," said Sir James Dyson, founder at his company.

The other winner was the developer of a household breast cancer screening device that gives reliable results in minutes. The Blue Box takes a urine sample and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to detect the early signs of breast cancer in just 40 minutes with 95 per cent accuracy.

The runners-up award went to a team of students from Imperial University and the Royal College of Art for their device which captures tyre-wear particles at the wheel of a vehicle that can be processed and reused in a variety of applications, creating a closed-loop system.

Another runner-up winner was the Scope lens invented by Ishan Mishra, Holden Beggs, Zhen Le Cao, Fernando J. Pena Cantu, Alisha Bhanji from the University of Waterloo, Canada. Most camera lenses use physical movement to zoom without loss in image quality, which is seen as a major problem for compact and mobile cameras.The Scope technology is capable of changing the optical power and without movement, it uses voltage to do that thus enabling a lossless camera zoom.


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