Winners of inaugural Circular Plastics Case competition announced

The winners of the Circular Plastics Case Competition, a new competition launched this year, have been announced. The competition, organised by non-profit organisation Net Impact in partnership with Hillenbrand Inc and The Coca-Cola Company, was created to bring together the next generation of innovators to ‘rethink the challenges the plastics value chain faces from creation to collection’.

“Because our equipment is used by the plastics and recycling industries, we can play an active role in being part of the solution,” said Kim Ryan, President and CEO of Hillenbrand. “With sustainability in mind, we created this competition to encourage the next generation to think outside the box and develop solutions that support a circular plastics economy.”

For this inaugural edition, the participants - consisting of teams of two to four members - were challenged to design solutions that would help keep plastics in the economy and out of the environment by using upstream innovation to reduce plastic leakage. The competition drew more than 50 submissions from undergraduate students, graduate students and professionals from 10 different countries across the globe - ‘some of the highest interest our organisation has ever seen’, said Karen Johns, CEO, GOOD Institute, home to Net Impact.

Of these solutions, five teams were selected as finalists. They were then invited to present their solutions to a panel of industry experts industry leaders from Hillenbrand, The Coca-Cola Company, and The Recycling Partnership. The winning teams were announced 27 April.

The 2023 Circular Plastics Case Competition winners are:

First Place team, winner of the $10,000 prize: Ashaya, an Indian-based startup that is turning post- consumer multi-layer plastic (MLP) typically found in packets of chips, into new products, starting with recycled sunglasses. The startup aims to increase the value of waste through technological and scientific innovations in recycling and then fairly redistribute that value to stakeholders in the supply chain, especially those who are the poorest: waste-pickers, their website states. Ashaya estimates that their lab has scaled to process more than 2,500 kilograms of plastic waste annually.

Second Place team, winner of the $2,000 prize: the Tanzanian-based startup Vendify. Vendify uses solar-powered vending stations in rural Tanzania to offer in-demand consumer products such as cooking oil and liquid soap in exchange for the plastic waste that rural local waste-pickers collect from the environment. The active business estimates it will be able to divert more than 1,000 kilograms of plastic waste from landfills annually after scaling.

Third Place team, winner  of the $1,000 prize is Ecovend, an early-stage business concept conceived from a group of MBA students at ESADE Business School in Barcelona, Spain. The business model would employ vending machines in grocery stores across Spain to eliminate the unrecyclable toilet paper plastic packaging, diverting and estimated 47 million kilograms of plastic from going into the landfill every year.

Hillenbrand plans to continue the partnership with Net Impact. Organisations interested in partnering with Hillenbrand and Net Impact on this initiative should contact Net Impact for more information.