Oleksiy Trelevsky, coordinator of the EcoCity, co-author of the project “Teach 1000 children Arduino robotics in schools of Ivano-Frankivsk”, co-author of the project “Children’s 3D-laboratory” and head of NGO “Free Arduino”, and Dmytro Obukhov, young inventor and developer of EcoCity, started to produce monitoring stations for measurements of the Ukrainian air quality basically at home, with a limited resources and only few team-mates in 2018. Their mission – luckily as a part of our joint Clean Air for Ukraine Project – is to achieve the right to clean air for all Ukrainian people. Today EcoCity was awarded for their work a prestigious yearly ECO-Oscar, announced within the ECOtransformation 2021.
Together with Dmytro Obukhov, EcoCity developed and in July 2020 introduced a unique mobile monitoring station Sapphire-32, now updated to Sapphire-64. Within the Clean Air for Ukraine Project, Oleksiy and his EcoCity team also launched technical support for the owners and users of monitoring stations, to provide service and help to those facing technical difficulties with the stations and at the same time to ensure the maximum number of functioning and reliable devices within the monitoring network. EcoCity keeps developing models of their monitoring stations, same as its operating system, as the recently introduced “Environment OS”.
EcoCity is a non-profit, environmental project of the Ukrainian network of public air quality monitoring stations, implemented by the NGO “Free Arduino” together with partners, the Czech NGO “Arnika” and scientific and technical advisers. The project was based on the idea of young inventors, robotics engineers from the city of Ivano-Frankivsk in 2018. Since then, the project has spread throughout Ukraine. Today, EcoCity is the largest network of more than 600 installed stations, with 280 currently transmitting data to our server. “We monitor not only particles PM2.5 and PM10, but also all pollutants recommended by the World Health Organization. Our stations can evaluate air quality by 18 pollutants,” explains Dmytro Obukhov.
EcoCity received the EcoOscar
Marcela Černochová from Arnika adds: “The network of the EcoCity monitoring stations provides communities, but also policymakers and administration, with better (sometimes even missing) data on air pollution in their neighborhoods. This is a great example of citizen science that contributes to protection of public health and the environment. The whole team of the Clean Air for Ukraine Project would like to congratulate the EcoCity crew and wish them many similar successes in the future!”
“We are fruitfully developing partnerships with civil society institutions, academia, experts and municipalities. Our goal is motivating the youth of Ukraine to socially useful inventions and the study of natural and technical sciences; informing the population about air quality in industrial agglomerations and in the most remote corners of the country; stimulating the development of state and municipal air quality monitoring systems. We are very grateful for such an award which confirms that our efforts in fighting for clean air for Ukraine make sense and are recognized and appreciated,” says Oleksiy Trelevsky.
