Nine-year-old Oyon Ganguli of Waltham, Massachusetts recently won the Mighty Minds contest, an American youth inventors competition jointly run by the National Inventors Hall of Fame and Camp Invention, a youth educational summer camp. His winning entry, called "The Cleaner", was made in collaboration with his friend Mateo Rosado.

Ganguli, who is Sahitya Akademi award-winning Bengali novelist Sunil Gangopadhyay's grandson, told a Waltham local newspaper that he had the idea for the device while watching a video of the ALS ice bucket challenge and realising that it was a waste of water because a "10-minute shower wastes 50 gallons of water".

Despite realising during the research phase that the product already exists, the young inventor still went to work on the prototype. The basic idea involves recycling and reusing water that normally drains away while taking a shower. The water is filtered by separate layers of gravel, sand and charcoal, after which it is collected in a storage tank before eventually being pumped back up for reuse. Ganguli also created a little door for maintenance, because the filter might get clogged over time.

Ganguli already has plans for a future project. "The Space Cleaner. It’s a solar-powered robot with one arm that melts space junk and the other arm vacuums up the melted liquid." His long-term goals, however, are to do one of three things, " [become] an inventor, work at Lego, or for Mojang [video game company responsible for Minecraft]".

He won the award for a prototype of a device that filters and recycles water.

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