He calls it the “Imagination Car.”
By Becca Inglis
Photo Credit: Emmanuel Alieu Mansaray
A university student in Sierra Leone has shown the world how to build a solar-powered car out of nothing but trash.
Harmful pollution is a significant challenge for many countries, but especially Sierra Leone, which is ranked the 17th most vulnerable country in the world when it comes to air pollution. It’s this exact problem that Emmanuel Alieu Mansaray, 24, hopes to ease with his clean-energy car design.
“I decided to create the ‘Imagination Solar Car,’ which is powered by the sun, to reduce the risk of contracting incommunicable and respiratory diseases like lung cancer, asthma, etc., caused by inhaling hazardous fumes emitted by cars using other types of fuel,” Mansaray told Interesting Engineering.
It took Mansaray three years to build the “Imagination” car, which began life as Sierra Leone’s first locally made solar-powered tricycle in 2018. But he has been experimenting with electronics for much longer.
When he was in primary school, Mansaray would collect aluminum cans from the trash and turn them into different varieties of cars. He also sourced old batteries and converted them into electricity for his home, which helped his family to study and charge their mobile phones at night. Read more here: https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/imagination-solar-car-trash-student-garbage-sierra-leone/