With over a million enthusiasts in Québec alone, the snowmobile is a highly-prized recreational vehicle. However, the standard snowmobile is a veritable threat to the environment as its two-stroke engine emits more hydrocarbons into the atmosphere in one hour that a car in a whole year. It was therefore with the intention, in the short-term, of successfully transforming the snowmobile into a more environment-friendly vehicle while maintaining the appeal and interest of its performance that a group of students from the École de technologie supérieure decided to launch the Quiets project. For the past two years, the team has been attempting to improve three of the vehicle’s aspects: noise, fuel consumption and emissions. By devising various simple and low-cost technological processes, the members of the Quiets project even obtained admirable results at the 2004 Clean Snowmobile Challenge, a major competition taking place in the United States: they won the acceleration and handling event, came in second for the modification cost and were third in regard to noise. Moreover, by taking part in exhibitions and giving demonstrations, Quiets not only attracted the attention of a large number of enthusiasts, it also aroused the interest of people in the snowmobile industry.
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“One environmentally aware citizen is good but two is better!” Bearing this saying in mind, in October 2004 a group of students from the Association de la maîtrise en environnement de l’Université de Sherbrooke (AMEUS) brilliantly orchestrated the 4e Semaine québécoise de réduction des déchets, an annual week-long event promoting waste reduction being held for the first time in the Eastern Townships. The recurrent theme of their commitment: residual waste management is more than ever a task to be shared by all. To heighten public awareness of this issue in the Eastern Townships and, above all, to prove the importance of becoming involved in this field, the event organizers used all the means at their disposal. Thus, numerous activities were held throughout the week including an evening of sketches and improvisation on environmentalist themes, a evening training course on domestic composting, an evening seminar on solutions for replacing dangerous domestic waste, a creative workshop on ecological Halloween costumes and decorations, morning chores on the banks of the Saint-François River and a visit to a local landfill site. In addition to these activities, the event was widely covered by the media and was attended by other groups such as Gestapoubelle and Action Saint-François. In total, almost a thousand citizens took part in the activities and several thousand others were reached through the media.
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It is said that to help save the planet, every little gesture counts. Fortunately, to help us make these gestures, there are people all over the world who are dedicated heart and soul to carrying out research in order to develop innovative and ecological technologies. This is true of Simon-Nicolas Deschênes and Jean-Mathieu Santerre, two students in electromechanical engineering at the Université du Québec à Rimouski who, thanks to their perseverance, have succeeded in transforming a standard gasoline-powered generator so that it produces less pollution. Thanks to their project, called Éco-Énergie, the modified generator now has the advantage of producing its full electrical power while reducing pollutant emissions by approximately 90%. Inspired by technology based on the Pantone principle, which consists of recuperating the heat produced by the exhaust of the generator’s engine to process the fuel, Éco-Énergie costs very little to run because the fuel is subsequently made up of 75 % water. The two students, who were the first in the world to apply the technology scientifically, have demonstrated that, through dedication, it is possible to protect the environment and, at the same time, generate concrete financial spin-offs.
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