The European Patent Office presented the 2009 European Inventor of the Year Awards on May 4 this year, awarding several inventors for their environmental contributions, and selecting a well-known solar energy researcher as the recipient of their Lifetime Achievement Award.

80-year old German scientist Adolf Goetzberger, which the conference nicknamed “the Sun God”, was presented the Lifetime award for recognition of his career-long achievements in both popularizing and harnessing solar energy. His earliest work helped to increase the efficiency of solar cells in the 1970’s and led him to roles as lead researcher in groundbreaking solar implementation plans throughout Europe. Goetzberger has been widely credited as a driving force behind Germany’s acceptance of solar power, which has led his nation to be the world’s leading market for solar photovoltaic technology.

Winners of the 2009 awards also were frequently tied to environmental success. Among them was Joseph Le Mer, a French mechanical engineer who took home the SMEs/Research award for 2009. Developing heating systems, Le Mer realized that home heating was often two things that consumers did not want: expensive and environmentally unfriendly. By designing an elegant, single-tube heat exchanger that could be manufactured cheaply and with a minimum of resources, Le Mer helped the entire industry take a large step toward sustainability. Combining that with his company’s insistence that work not be outsourced, Le Mer appears to have hit on a promising solution for a sometimes wasteful industry.

In the medical category, no winners were more environmentally sound than a Chinese team led by Professor Yiqing Zhou of the Beijing Institute for Microbiology, who used Chinese herbal knowledge to extract compounds from plants used for centuries to help develop an efficient and sustainable source of malaria-fighting drugs.

Image: Joseph Le Mer