10/10/2019

AquaHacking Fest: A Gathering Not to Be Missed

The Gaspé Beaubien Foundation is proud to support the very first AquaHacking Fest. On September 27th, the AquaHacking Fest will be held at the “Grand Quai de Montréal pavilion”for the grand finale and fundraising of the AquaHacking 2019 challenge. The finalist teams' solutions will be presented at this gathering and will raise funds to contribute even more to the innovation and the conservation of freshwater sources. Everyone can enjoy the culinary delights of local food trucks as well as a concert by Quebec rapper Koriass while dancing to the rhythm of DJ Manifest's music. Innovate to Protect This year, six teams entered the grand finale of the AquaHacking contest and will have the opportunity to showcase their innovative clean technology solutions to sustainably solve five major issues affecting the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence watershed. The finalists each received $ 2,000 in funding early this summer to fine-tune their solutions, plus an all-expenses-paid expedition to Elbow Lake, Ontario to meet with various industry stakeholders. The challenges for which teams must propose clean, sustainable and marketable solutions this year are:

The contamination of rivers by salting;
Flooding;
The pollution caused by disposable wipes and micro plastics;
The public awareness regarding the use of municipal water.

The team finalists will have the chance to win financial support of up to $ 25,000 for the development and marketing of their solutions:

The Green Stop (Montreal, QC, Toronto, ON): Intelligent and fast water stations designed in a sustainable manner to encourage the use of refillable water bottles.
Bello Water (Montreal, QC): Reinventing the distribution of drinking water by providing sustainable alternatives to plastic water bottles through a simple technical solution supported by an application.
Droplets (Oshawa, ON, Montreal, QC): Building public confidence in regards to municipal drinking water with innovative IBM Watson artificial intelligence.
Clean Nature (Quebec City, QC, Victoria, BC): Prevent excess road salt through an adapted artificial intelligence (AIM) model based on real-time weather conditions.
Chemistry UdeS (Montreal, QC, Sherbrooke, QC): Fight microplastics with an additional lint filter that catches microfibers that pass through the air filters on dryers.
Salt-Ed (Montreal, QC): Reducing saline water contamination with road-sanding equipment that is easy to implement, inexpensive and requires no large-scale testing.

Concrete Commitments In the spirit of cooperation for the conservation of water, Nan-B de Gaspé Beaubien took the initiative to invite an additional panel to discuss concrete solutions on a larger scale. The representatives from the main political parties,who will take part in the federal elections in October 2019, will participate in the AquaHacking Fest event in a debate on concrete political actions they are ready to commit to if they are elected. The co-chair and matriarch of the Gaspé Beaubien Foundation also launched a petition calling on all political parties to include in their election platform a commitment to extend the restriction on single-use plastics to bottled water and all beverages, except in case of emergencies, before December 31st, 2022. "My husband and I founded AquaHacking and launched the AquaHacking Challenge in order to create solutions to the most urgent water problems. We need your help to protect our water bodies from plastic waste by ensuring that the proposed restrictions on single-use plastics be also applied to the bottled water and the beverage industry. Canada must play a leadership role in protecting water. - Nan-b Gaspé Beaubien, co-chair and matriarch of the Gaspé Beaubien Foundation. The Gaspé Beaubien Foundation is proud to invest in concrete and ambitious projects to stimulate Quebec’s entrepreneurship as well as technological innovations serving the conservation of the environment and freshwater sources. For the Gaspé Beaubien family, it is in focusing on ingenuity and the desire to improve the world in which we live that we are able to achieve great things.