00:00Last applause for our Inventors. Thanks for being here. Great.
00:05Here are the winners of the Young Inventors Award 2025.
00:09Presented by the European Patent Office, it aims to highlight innovations that contribute to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.
00:16The textile industry is responsible for 8% of CO2 emissions worldwide.
00:21American scientists Nika and Leila Mashouf drew inspiration from nature to develop enzymes that convert industrial CO2 emissions into biodegradable cellulose.
00:33A tree breathes in CO2. It starts from a seed and is able to use that carbon to grow its trunk, branches, and leaves.
00:41We're basically mimicking that process, taking carbon and making these essential materials, but without needing to harvest the trees.
00:48So we mimic this process in chemical reactors that are simple and low-cost, and we can make cellulose materials, which is our target product, in minutes instead of decades and without harming trees.
01:01Food waste is responsible for 10% of CO2 emissions, according to the FAO.
01:07Ugandan entrepreneurs Sandra Nambuzo and Samuel Maita have developed a bag that extends the shelf life of fruit.
01:14Capulax is basically a sachet that we place in fruit boxes during storage or delivery, and it releases an active ingredient that inhibits enzyme phospholipase D, that is responsible for sinuses or membrane deterioration in fruits.
01:29Marie Perrin, a Franco-American chemist, has developed a process for recycling the rare earths found in electronic waste.
01:36So it's a family of 17 elements from the periodic table, and you've probably never heard about them.
01:42They have weird names like presudinium, neodynium, europium, but we rely on them every single day.
01:47They're in our phones, in our computers, but also in a lot of green technologies like wind turbines and electric cars.
01:52So we really rely on them every single day, and we need them for the energy transition as well.
01:56But their production by mining poses big geopolitical and environmental issues,
02:00and so recycling is actually kind of like the magic solution to both the geopolitics and the environmental impact.
02:07The People's Choice Award went to a team of Spanish researchers who developed a label that changes color when a food item is out of date,
