Irish awards winners announced

The varied entries, ranging from environmentally friendly road-retexturing processes to solar-powered waste compactors, were adjudicated by a judging panel of industry experts.

The judges included Lisa Shiels of the research and innovation programme of the EPA, Fred McDarby, manager of Environment and Green Technology at Enterprise Ireland and Bernard Potter, editor of the Engineers Journal.

After quizzing each exhibitor separately on the environmental aspects of their products and almost two hours of intense deliberation and debate, the judges came to the following conclusions.

WINNER – Peek Traffic, Lumis LED street lighting lantern.

The Lumis LED street light is unique; it is the first known street light to utilise a combination of LED colours to optimise vision within the “mesopic” street lighting light level conditions. This innovation gives “More sight for less light”.

The ethos behind the lanterns design has been to research and design to give an environmentally friendly, sustainable lighting solution that can provide 20%-70% energy and carbon footprint savings.

The lantern also has a 20 year life, offering large savings on maintenance costs with reduced high level working and traffic management health and safety risk.

Runner up was Durakerb, environmentally friendly kerbstones.

Durakerb is the revolutionary, lightweight and environmentally-friendly new kerbstone complying with Health & Safety guidelines concerning the manual handling of kerbstones.

Manufactured from a blend of recycled polymers, the kerbstone will help all specifiers and contractors to comply with government aims of building a sustainable future.

More importantly, it will enable contractors to continue to lay kerbstones exactly as they have done for generations, but in a quicker and safer fashion.

100% recyclable and light weight, Durakerb can be laid without the use of cumbersome and expensive lifting equipment thus increasing the lay speeds dramatically and reducing overall fitting costs.

The visitor vote proved to be a popular feature with more than 200 people nominating their favourite product or service during the shows.

The winner was SANYX International Ltd, FaxCop, a device which sits between the telephone socket and your fax machine and automatically stops unwanted junk or spam faxes while still allowing legitimate faxes through.

Sandra Bilz, marketing manager for Resource & recover, said: “Congratulations to the three winners.

“There were lots of interesting and innovative entries and the judges did not have an easy task to determine which one should come out top.

“I am already looking forward to next year’s entries which I am sure will be equally exciting.”