The red plastic cup \u2014 popular at picnics, parties, and tailgates \u2014 troubled Axel Delakowski \u201921.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought of all of the cups that are thrown away,\u201d says the biomedical engineering major. \u201cThere had to be a more sustainable way.\u201d<\/p>\n
He teamed up with three fellow seniors, finance major Thomas Fitzgerald, marketing major Joaquin Garcia, and chem major Jay Lim, to form Team Zero. The team entered the 2021 Mayo Business Plan Competition, wanting to design a replacement for the single-use plastic cups.<\/p>\n
Their solution was \u03c7<\/span>-Cups (pronounced \u201ckai-cups\u201d), a riff on the Greek letter chi and their cup\u2019s primary ingredient, chitin, a substance derived from seafood waste like crab and shrimp shells. The product is renewable, naturally biodegradable, and home-compostable. It also proved to be a winning formula, earning the students the competition\u2019s $30,000 grand prize.<\/p>\n \u201cThe diverse backgrounds of our team provided a lot of collective knowledge,\u201d says Garcia.<\/p>\n Next up, the group will investigate methods of mass production and develop plans to market the \u03c7<\/span>-Cups to college students and distributors who are environmentally conscious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Four students plan to change the way we hold our drinks The red plastic cup \u2014 popular at picnics, parties, and tailgates \u2014 troubled Axel Delakowski \u201921. \u201cI thought of all of the cups that are thrown away,\u201d says the biomedical engineering major. \u201cThere had to be a more sustainable way.\u201d He teamed up with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":332,"featured_media":11726,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-on-campus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/332"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11725"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11727,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11725\/revisions\/11727"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tcnjmagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}