Sustainable Development Awards 2021

For the second time, the Board of the St. Pölten UAS honoured sustainable development-related project and research works created by students with the university’s Sustainable Development Awards. The winners received prizes worth EUR 1,000 each.

“We set great store by sustainability. The Board of the St. Pölten UAS promotes activities and initiatives addressing the topic of sustainable development at out university, and the purpose of this award is to support students whose works are dedicated to important topics for the future”, explains Alois Frotschnig, Chairperson of the UAS Board.

“The submitted projects do not only showcase our students’ commitment to the topic of sustainable development. They also document their innovative power and the high quality of these works and our study programmes”, says Susanne Roiser, Deputy Chairperson of the UAS Board.

The Winners

The Sustainable Development Awards 2021 of the St. Pölten UAS went to:

• Sabrina Baumann: The Carbon Footprint of Business Trips for the St. Pölten UAS (category: “Sustainability and Mobility Solutions for Tomorrow”). The project analyses business trip behaviours and calculates the associated CO2 emissions.
  
  
• Thomas Gerstenmayer, Mathias Schwarzinger, Markus Diem, Hakan Kadam, Michael Kuntner, Lukas Schmiedl: Variant Analysis City Railway Krems (category: “Sustainability and Mobility Solutions for Tomorrow”). The project examined different design variants for a city railway in Krems.
  
  
• Katharina Heller, Zeki Akyurt, Christoph Ebner, Agnes Jünemann, Marlene Schön, Deniz Sengül, Barbara Thalmann, Paul Tudosa, Manuela Türk, Christoph Wilhelmer, Janine Winter: Corporate Social Work – A Chimera!? Aspects of Corporate Social Work (categories: “Sustainability and Social Affairs” and “Sustainability and Economics”). Social Work at the workplace promotes a corporate culture that allows employees to be healthy, productive and satisfied.
  
  
• Marlies Riepl, Albert Weisz, Clément Pousse, Guilherme Osswald, Nerrea Urresti: URA, Stop Misusing – Start Reusing (category: “Sustainable Development Goals”). The team has developed an idea for a shower system that stores the water for use in the toilet flush.
  
  
• Martin Seidel, Barbara Fessl, Stefanie Hardt: CLEO – The First Sustainable Trading App (category: “Sustainability and Economics”). The aim of the idea is to create a trading app for sustainable financial products.

Support from the Society for the Promotion of the St. Pölten UAS

The prizes for the Sustainable Development Awards were endowed by the Society for the Promotion of the St. Pölten UAS. “No research and teaching institution can shirk from sustainable development. We, the Society for the Promotion of the St. Pölten UAS, have set ourselves the goal of training the next generation of leaders, so it goes without saying that we pursue the goal of sustainability and are glad to support this initiative. I would like to thank all participants for committing themselves to a better world”, says Josef Bruckschlögl, the Society’s Chairman.

Members of the jury included: Josef Bruckschlögl (Chairman of the Society for the Promotion of the St. Pölten UAS, CEO of kwak Telecom Ltd), Sarah de Coninck (Researcher Circular Economy, UC Leuven-Limburg University of Applied Sciences, Belgium, E³UDRE²S Member), Christine Haselbacher (member of the St. Pölten UAS Board, Head of the Department of Social Work), Lukas Kroisenbrunner (student representative, member of the UAS Board), and Thomas Preslmayr (member of the Sustainability Committee of the UAS Board, Section Head Project Management and Quality Enhancement, Department of Rail Technology and Mobility).

Alliance of Sustainable Universities

At the beginning of October 2021, representatives of eleven universities of applied sciences signed the “Charter for the Alliance of Sustainable Universities”. The St. Pölten UAS is one of them. These higher education institutions have set themselves the target of working on the sustainability topic together by adopting a holistic approach based on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and pooling activities.