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The main prize of 500 euros went to Kerstin Wunder, a graduate of the Applied Life Science Master's degree program, for her final thesis at the Faculty of Engineering. For the first time this year, there were also two special prizes, which Maximilian Zarte, Söke Sabelus and Robin Terbrüggen accepted during a press event at Stadtwerke. Maximilian Zarte is missing from the group photo.

Kerstin Wunder dedicated her Master's thesis to the topic of "Detailed investigations into effective phosphorus recovery from biogas digestate with consideration of economic efficiency". Phosphorus is a finite resource that is an important component of fertilizers, for example in agriculture. As there are maximum limits for fertilizing the soil with certain nutrients, it makes sense, for example, to separate the excess phosphorus from the rest and recycle it as a resource. Kerstin Wunder has achieved this using various methods.

Maximilian Zarte received a special prize of 300 euros from the competition for his dissertation on sustainable production processes. In his work, he developed a concept to support production planning based on sustainability and supplemented it with a real-life case study. On the one hand, this enables the evaluation of several production planning targets, taking into account economic, ecological and social aspects, and also provides information on how a high degree of sustainability can be achieved. 

Soeke Sabelus from Leerhafe and Robin Terbrüggen from Varel examined samples of microplastics found on honey bees as part of their project work. The students used Raman spectroscopy, in which light scattered from solids is recorded. Sabelus and Terbrüggen chose this topic because of the increasing amount of microplastics in the environment. In addition to environmental toxins and mite infestation, this is another important stress factor with regard to bee mortality, as the students emphasized. Both are in their fourth semester of Engineering Physics, a cooperative degree course offered by Emden/Leer University of Applied Sciences together with the University of Oldenburg. They received the Stadtwerke's creativity prize of 200 euros.

Our graduate Kai Rösken from the electrical engineering course received the first Emden Sustainability Award in 2021 for his instructive bachelor's thesis:

In it, Mr. Rösken dealt with the development of a freely accessible computer program that makes it possible to design battery storage systems for photovoltaic systems more effectively - and thus produce more green electricity.

Currently, planners and installers are generally reliant on commercial software programs when designing battery storage systems. In order to remove this barrier to access and thus implement more battery storage systems and consequently more photovoltaic systems, an open-source design tool is being developed at the university as part of the PIEG-Strom research project. Kai Rösken has made a significant contribution to the creation of this freely accessible tool with the battery model he has implemented.