Eco-contest: Five top prizes and 14 special prizes awarded at the BundesUmweltWettbewerb

The thirty-fourth BundesUmweltWettbewerb (BUW) competition has honored outstanding projects around helping and protecting the environment.

A total of five top prizes – the highest category in the competition – went to projects based in the states of Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, and North Rhine-Westphalia. A further fourteen projects, from Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Bremen, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westfalia, Rheinland-Pfalz, Saxony and Thuringia, received special prizes, the second highest category of award.

This year’s BUW awards ceremony, where representatives from the nineteen award-winning projects received their prizes, took place on September 28, 2024, in Hamburg, at the State Institute for Teacher Training and School Development (LI). Prof. Dr. Gunnar Friege, chair of the competition’s judging panel I and professor of physics education at Leibniz University Hannover, and Prof. Dr. Gerrit Schüürmann, chair of the judging panel II, former head of the Department of Environmental Chemistry at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, and professor of theoretical and environmental chemistry at TU Bergakademie Freiberg (TUBAF), presented the awards.

Dr. Tim Schulze, an author and a official at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, was in attendance at the ceremony and gave the celebratory address. Words of welcome came from Thomas Bressau, competitions officer at Hamburg’s School and Vocational Training Authority.

This thirty-fourth edition of the BUW attracted 281 project submissions from, in total, 635 young people aged 10 to 20; all of them proved once again that many socially aware members of the upcoming generation are extremely keen to launch innovative ideas that tackle key issues of our time around sustainable development and care for the environment, including protecting the climate in the face of the current climate emergency and conserving species, bodies of water, and resources.

You can read more (in German) about the award-winning projects and about the thirty-fourth BUW by following this link: https://www.scienceolympiaden.de/buw/mappen

The BundesUmweltWettbewerb is an annual national environment-themed competition in Germany that recognizes young people’s efforts to undertake projects that seek to identify the causes of environmental problems and tackle them with commitment and creativity, in the spirit of the contest’s motto Vom Wissen zum nachhaltigen Handeln – roughly translatable as ‘Turning knowledge into sustainable action’.

The Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (IPN) in Kiel organizes and runs the BUW, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and recommended by the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany (KMK). The energy and commitment shown by the members of the judging panels, those responsible for managing the competition in each federal state, and the competition’s supporters and funders was, as ever, crucial to the BUW’s success – we’d like to thank them all.

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