Congratulations to a team of our undergraduate students, namely Lam Ying Tung and Cheng Tin Yui, for winning the Silver Award of Outstanding Presentation at IFMA’s Inter-Institutional Competition on Facility Management Project Presentation 2021.
IFMA’s Inter-Institutional Competition on Facility Management Project Presentation 2021
The IFMA presentation competition is an inter-institutional presentation competition in the Asia Pacific region. Founded in 2011, the competition encourages students to ignite their passion in the profession and pursuing in Facility Management (FM) as their career of choice. The competition focuses on eleven FM core competencies, including Communication, Finance and business, Human factors, Leadership and strategy, Operations and maintenance, Project management, Quality, Real estate and property management, Technology, Environmental stewardship and sustainability, and Emergency preparedness and business continuity. Eight finalists, coming from different institutions, were shortlisted to the final round of the competition. The project presentation was held on 22 January 2022.
The students’ presentation topic falls in the FM core competency “Environmental stewardship and sustainability”.
Presentation Title:
Potential Development of Electric Vehicle Batteries Recycling in Hong Kong
Abstract of Presentation:
Transportation accounts for around 24% of direct CO2 emissions from fuel combustion in 2020 (IEA, 2020). The use of electric vehicles (EV) has been a worldwide trend, in replace of traditional vehicles, which offers ideal opportunities for broadening the implementation of renewables to the transport sector. As proved by O’Dea (2019) and Reichmuth (2020), electric vehicles’ life cycle global warming emissions are significantly lower than those for vehicles fueled with gasoline or diesel traditionally, electric vehicles are an option for reducing the exploitation of fossil fuels. However, the lifespan of electric vehicle batteries is estimated to be 3 to 15 years (D. Strickland et al., 2014). Large amount of end-of-life EV batteries is expected to emerge in the near future. It is estimated that the EVs put on the road in 2019 will eventually generate 500,000 metric tons of battery waste to our landfills (Harper et al., 2019). Yet, the recycling industry of EV batteries recycling is still so immature that only a few countries support battery recycling, including Belgium, China, South Korea, the US and the UK. According to the International Energy Agency (2021), the world currently has enough capacity to recycle 180,000 metric tons of dead EV batteries per annum, universal recycling of EV batteries is one of the key issues that researchers have to tackle.
The students would like to express their sincere gratitude to Dr. Joseph Lai for nominating them to join the Competition. Also, the students stated that they reflected a lot on these FM topics and got inspired by the judging panel.
The Department would like to congratulate Ying Tung and Tin Yui on the excellent achievement. We wish them continued success.
For more details about the Competition, please visit
https://ifma.org.hk/news-detail.php?id=114
