College Students Lead Conservation
The Greenway Foundation hosts an annual, year-long competition for Colorado university students designed to stretch their engineering and creative thinking skills while addressing pollution in the South Platte River. This real-world competition has led to real change for our waterways. A design for The Greenway Foundation’s Nautilus originally came from students in this very competition.
2023-2024 Clean Water Challenge Competition
This year The Greenway Foundation worked with a team from Colorado School of Mines for the Clean Water Challenge. We tasked the teams with tackling the environmental challenges that road salts cause. The team spend two semesters researching the problem and coming up with a concept.
The team presented in April 2024 to our staff and board of directors, showcasing their innovative solution to road salt runoff. The team focused on Chloride removal using an Ion exchange system that could be placed after a hydrodynamic separator or in a standard storm drain, and safely remove chloride via an anion exchange resin.
Thank you also to Colorado Water Conservation Board for providing grant funding for this project!
Participating in the Clean Water Challenge as a student was an interesting project that presented a lot of unusual challenges. As designers we want to make beautiful things, but creating something that cleans up trash efficiently while not marring the beautiful Colorado landscape was a unique experience. Of course, winning the design challenge with Nautilus was incredibly rewarding on its own, but getting to see your idea come to life and function as intended in the real world is quite remarkable.
Previous Clean Water Challenges
Despite the significant evolution in the health of the South Platte River, the reality of trash and other forms of pollution continue to be an ongoing challenge to the river. In response to this reality, Greenway challenged higher education students in the previous Clean Water Challenges to develop designs for urban waterway trash removal devices.
The Greenway Foundation works to develop promising innovations from the Clean Water Challenge into real-world solutions. The Nautilus passive trash removal system was originally presented in the 2015-2016 Clean Water Challenge.
Clean Water Design Challenge Updates
Clean Water Challenge for 2021-2022!
Tuesday was quite the exciting day for The Greenway Foundation since we finally got to hear from the teams that participated in this year’s Clean…
Thank You to Our Clean Water Design Challenge Sponsors
