An 18-year-old student from Ireland has been named as the European winner of a global environmental sustainability competition.<\/p>\n
Arya Satheesh, from Letterkenny, Co Donegal, is one of seven regional winners in The Earth Prize 2026, a global competition for students between the ages of 13 and 19.<\/p>\n
Arya’s project, Eco Purge, is a biodegradable plastic that also removes existing microplastics in the environment.<\/p>\n
She has already collaborated with researchers at University College Dublin and ATU Letterkenny, as well as BiOrbic Bioeconomy Research Centre, to develop a working prototype.<\/p>\n
With $12,500 of prize funding from The Earth Prize, she now plans to scale the solution for real-world use in products like packaging and compost bags, making it easier to tackle microplastic pollution on a larger scale.<\/p>\n
“Plastic pollution doesn’t just disappear, it breaks into tiny pieces that stay in our environment. I wanted to create something that could help tackle that problem directly,” she said.<\/p>\n
“Eco Purge is designed to both replace plastic and help remove existing microplastics, and this is just the beginning , and I hope it can become a scalable solution that makes a real difference.”<\/p>\n
The Earth Prize is run by The Earth Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in Geneva, Switzerland, founded during the School Strike for Climate in 2019.<\/p>\n
The global winner of the competition will be crowned later this month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An 18-year-old student from Ireland has been named as the European winner of a global environmental sustainability competition.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":443138,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43],"class_list":["post-443137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443137\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/443138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}