 You’ve
heard of turning trash into treasure. Well, some
enterprising Smith School undergraduates are turning food
waste into…dirt. Along the way, they also turned it into a
top grade. And with a little luck, they might turn it into a
prosperous business as well.
Their story begins with class assignment for the Quality
Enhancement Systems and Teams (QUEST) program, one of the
Smith School’s Undergraduate Fellows programs. Each year,
sophomores in the QUEST class “Introduction to Design and
Quality” work on a project that will allow them to apply
what they are learning to a real-world problem. Last year,
that project involved participation in the “Eco-Imagination”
contest co-sponsored by GE and mtvU—MTV’s 24-hour college
network—which called upon students to create a process,
product or service to make the world a cleaner, greener,
more efficient place. The students—Julia Perskie, operations
management and information systems; Vighna Rajesh Karyampudi,
mechanical engineering; Joel Liebman, finance and economics;
Anna Volper, marketing; and W. Nathaniel Brown, aerospace
engineering—decided to focus their project on a way to
improve the University of Maryland’s composting program.
Composting takes organic waste, such as food and paper
products, and accelerates its decomposition into fertile
soil rich with organic material. The university composts 90
tons of food, paper and other biodegradable waste each year,
but the students found that this was a paltry 10 percent of
what the university could compost. That is significant
because an effective composting system can save money.
“The university has a per-ton cost to haul away trash,
but a significantly reduced per-ton cost to haul away
compost,” says Joel Liebman. The composting company will
eventually be able to sell the composted soil, so it charges
less to haul away compost than to haul away trash.
Clearly it made economic sense to separate compostable
materials from plain trash. So what was keeping the
university from making the most of this opportunity? The
students found that defining the problem was, well, half the
problem, and by far the hardest part of their assignment.
Here’s what they discovered: the dish room, where dishes
are scraped, is plagued with high staff turnover, making it
hard to train workers in proper sorting techniques. And
during the dining room’s peak traffic times, there wasn’t
enough time to sort compost from plain trash anyway.
After wrestling for a while with these seemingly
intractable problems, the group had an epiphany: Moving the
responsibility for getting compostable material into a
compost bin from the workers to the students neatly resolved
all those issues.
Of course, that opened up a whole new set of problems.
How could the group get their busy and hard-working fellow
students to take on extra work, even this tiny bit of extra
work? The group spent hours surveying and observing the
behavior of freshman and sophomores in the North Campus
Diner, trying to figure out what would encourage people to
sort their compostable materials from trash.
“We asked ourselves ‘What is the simplest thing that
would solve all the problems?’” says Nate Brown. Their
answer: the CompoStationTM, an eye-catching bin in a movable
cart that includes a place to park trays, freeing up your
hands to scrape your plate, and a built-in scraping device,
making it quick and easy for students to dump their food
before taking their trays and dishes to the dishwashing
line.
The group started out with much more complicated designs,
but after talking with advisor Gerald Suarez, executive
director of QUEST, they pared their product down to
something that is effective but also cheap enough to produce
commercially.
The CompoStation now sits in the North Campus Diner, and
Dining Services at the University has asked the group to
produce more that can be used at other dining areas on
campus. But they can also imagine a customer base that
includes other universities, hospitals, and mall food
courts.
The Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship has been an
important supporter of this nascent business, providing the
group with cash for their initial marketing and educational
materials, which the group posted around the Diner to
encourage students to use the CompoStation.
These budding entrepreneurs aren’t totally sure where
their venture is going—they want to see if the CompoStation
can really save the university enough money to be a
commercially viable project. |
Nate
Brown: We found out that the problem was the important part.
It took us more time to find the problem in the composting
system than it did to create the solution. Once we found the
real problem, we could solve it and make a difference.