ORONO – When University of Maine engineering students hit the slopes at the Winter Park Resort in Colorado on April 3, they’ll be aiming for more than a thrilling run on a fast course. The 12 members of UMaine’s 2004 Energy Challenge team are hoping that their custom-designed paper snowboard will carry them to another first-place finish in a national engineering competition.

“We’re getting excited,” said team captain Mike Byrd of Bangor.

“At first we felt kind of lost trying to figure out how to build the board. What we were trying wasn’t giving us the results we wanted. The turning point for us came when we toured the wood composites center here [at UMaine] and saw the machine they use to make boards out of sawdust and plastics.”

Byrd and team member Joe Ramos of New Sweden work part time at the Georgia Pacific mill in Old Town and had access to paper dust, a waste product generated by the tissue manufacturing process. Georgia Pacific normally disposes of the dust in a landfill. The dust turned out to be the perfect ingredient to mix with plastic and run through an extrusion machine at the Advanced Engineered Wood Composites Center.

The U.S. Department of Energy and the Institute of Paper Science and Technology at Georgia Tech sponsor the annual Energy Challenge. Its purpose is to encourage students to develop engineering designs that save energy and consider waste recycling and reuse. According to the DOE, the pulp and paper manufacturing is the second-most-intensive energy industry in the nation.

“This project has given us the opportunity to think about alternatives,” said Byrd. “We’ve gotten to apply some of the techniques that we’ve been learning about in our engineering courses. There’s a lot of satisfaction in going from the beginning, when we had no idea of how we were going to make it, to seeing a final product.”

During the competition, students will subject their snowboards to stress tests and race them down a short course. Students also must present information before a panel of judges and submit written materials that demonstrate how their products meet technical criteria for energy use, recycling and composition. UMaine took first place in the Energy Challenge in 1999 with an innovative paper kayak. In other years, students have built a paper windsurfing board, a paper sailboat sail and a packaging container.

This year’s competition features 13 teams from the United States and Canada.