Summer Showcase Highlights How a Circular Economy is Built by Innovaiton and Collaboration
17 pitches for solutions driving reuse, recycling, composting and other solutions for a circular economy.
On June 12th at the Eastern Michigan University campus, the NextCycle Michigan Summer Showcase put the spotlight on 17 teams as they pitched their reuse, recycling, composting, and recycled-content projects. An expert judging panel and an audience of entrepreneurs, small businesses, brands, investors, community representatives, and recycling industry professionals listened to the innovative and collaborative ideas that could build a stronger circular economy in the state.
The Summer Showcase featured projects organized into two tracks. Each team was allotted five minutes to pitch their project, followed by five minutes for the judging panel to ask clarifying questions. Judges scored each pitch based on the team’s value proposition, financial readiness, attractiveness to investment, competence, and economic, environmental and social impacts.
FLOWS Track: The Food, Liquids & Organic Waste Systems (FLOWS) Accelerator Track supports projects that transform any aspect of organics recovery in Michigan, from food donation to food scrap recovery to new market development for finished compost.
RIT Track: The Recycling Innovation & Technology (RIT) Accelerator Track supports projects that advance new material recovery technologies, waste minimization techniques, or other advancements in sustainable materials management.
HIGHLIGHTS FROM TEAM PITCHES
FLOWS Teams
Wood Work Detroit: Currently the city of Detroit removes approximately 4,000 trees annually at a cost of $2 million. There is an opportunity to reuse at least 20% of those trees and at the same time reduce carbon emissions and generate job opportunities and workforce development by using the lumber to produce furniture, musical instruments, maybe a canoe or two.
BioWorks Energy: Food waste and other organics carry three times the energy potential of sewage sludge alone in the anaerobic digestion process, we’re able to produce significant electricity, selling it back to the wastewater plant or municipality at a discount, reducing their electricity cost.
Full Cycle Logistics: Built by a small-scale hauler for other haulers like composters, recyclers, food rescue programs, and anyone that has a distributed customer base that needs to move material from customers to depots and back, our online tool helps to manage their customers and operations efficiently and cost effectively in one place.
Beaver Island/St. James Township: Right now, all of the island’s garbage and recycling leaves the island on a barge and goes to Charlevoix. If we can divert 110 tons of food waste per year out of the garbage and process it on the island, that means eight fewer containers would leave the island and a savings of over $21,000.
New Horizon Compost: We are the first compost site in Michigan legally approved to accept cannabis waste. We’ll collect yard waste from our landscape projects and charge a cannabis waste tip and transportation fee. The finished compost will be used in our landscape projects, sold locally, and blended to make a high value topsoil.
Emmet County: Excess food waste isn't going anywhere, and what's ending up in the landfill is the lowest hanging fruit to materials management planning and meeting Michigan's climate action goals. Our current food scrap collection program serves over 40 businesses and diverts over 600,000 pounds annually. Our next phases will include operational refinements, evaluation of bulk delivery, cost and pricing analyses, and site and capital improvements, driving toward a residential food scrap collection pilot.
Eastside Compost: The next and ideal customer is the neighbor to our existing customer in the urban core of Lansing who wants to divert food waste to create compost. Because of the floodplain in Lansing, some vacant land cannot be built on, but can be used for urban farming. Circularity is possible as the nutrients that are grown in the Eastside, get eaten in the Eastside, and then come back to the Eastside as compost.
Hemp 4 Humanity: Hemp - we struck a new kind of oil. Hemp can be harvested to make everyday products like paper, plastic, and fuel. With a little processing and infrastructure, the waste material from the hemp paper production from a 30-acre farm, can in turn produce up to six prefabricated carbon negative houses. There's a new demand in our agriculture, in our building systems, and in our relationship to the environment.
Sanctuary Farms: Detroit is the biggest city in the state, with the most food waste, and no industrial scale composting in the city. Our farm and compost operations are located in the Riverbend neighborhood of Detroit, are worked by many people that live in Detroit, and the finished compost product is used by the people of Detroit.
RIT Teams
Prairie Robotics: When contamination enters the recycling stream, it has to be manually removed or it can prevent good recyclables from reaching end markets. With cameras mounted directly on recycling trucks we are able to identify contamination in the individual household and send hyper personalized education to that household, generating an average decrease of 32% contamination in as little as six months.
Fibarcode: We engineer an optical signature directly into textile fiber so it can be read and provide life cycle tracability – what it is made out of, when it is being resold, or when it is being recycled. We’re creating digital fingerprints for textiles.
Nowhere Collective: Our app will more effectively connect upcycling artisans with contributors of materials as well as with buyers of their handmade goods – building the trashiest, beautifully crafted, locally sourced, handmade marketplace.
Chippin’ In: We have about 1500 people who sleep outside in Michigan every single day. We saw a way to help those individuals with a material that is sent to the landfill daily. The mylar material that is used in emergency blankets – mylar – is the same material in your chip bag. We upcycle your potato chip bags and other mylar materials into sleeping bags for displaced and nomadic people and other products like totes for sale.
PittMoss: Peatlands are precious ecosystems that we currently dig up to use in make potting soil. We don't want to dig up something that stores more carbon than all of the world's forests combined, just to grow petunias. We have found a way to take recycled paper and cardboard, turn it into cellulose fiber, and then engineer that into some of the top performing potting soil available on the market today.
Great Lakes Recycling: There has been giant growth in the battery market both with automotive and consumer grade batteries that will need responsible end of life handling due to the serious safety risk. We collect as much information on each battery pack so we can maximize the value and send each component to the correct facility for proper recycling.
Takeout Takeout: Customers have the ability to choose reusable takeout containers with their orders and the option to swap out the containers during their next delivery or pickup. With one café operating one day a week, over the course of two years we have a 90% participation rate with a 75% return rate and over 3,000 reuses. We take the trash out of takeout.
Design Declassified: Michigan has the most trash in its landfills per capita than any other state in the US, and it's obvious there's too much plastic out there. We're reshaping a sustainable future with innovative and versatile sheet materials made entirely from recycled plastics that are suitable for a variety of applications including architectural and furniture manufacturing.
KEYNOTE
Phil Roos, director of the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE), provided the keynote address and highlighted Michigan’s efforts to minimize waste and increase recycling.
“It’s imperative that we move toward a sustainable future, not only to ensure that our children and grandchildren enjoy the wonders of the Great Lakes State – as we have – but to continue leading in a rapidly changing economic landscape,” stated Roos.
Roos pointed to the development of a circular economy where business models focus on the need to reuse, repurpose, and recycle materials instead of landfilling them.
“EGLE is proud to lead the NextCycle initiative, which is leveraging public and private investment in Michigan’s recycling system to put materials that were headed to the landfill back into the supply chain,” added Roos.
THE WINNERS
Click on the image to see details about each award. Once the image is open, you can advance to the next image by clicking on the image or arrows at the side of the image.
SPECIAL AWARD
In a surprise announcement, Julie Staveland, assistant division director for the Materials Management Division within EGLE, revealed a total of $85,000 in Harvest Grant funding would be distributed to the 17 teams ($5,000 to each team) that pitched at the Summer Showcase and are completing the NextCycle Michigan Accelerator Program.
“You have sown the seeds and grown your projects. It is now time to harvest those endeavors and take it to the next level,” said Staveland. “We believe in the work you are doing, and in the mission, and we will continue to invest in you, the change makers.”
These first-of-their-kind grants were designed for teams completing the Accelerator Program and will help teams to continue their work creating solutions for sustainable materials management.
MICHIGAN MARKETPLACE
The Summer Showcase concluded with the announcement of the relaunch of the Michigan Materials Marketplace. In partnership with Rheaply, the online platform allows businesses to create a collaborative network where one organization’s hard-to-recycle waste and by-products can become another organization’s feedstock for new production. The Materials Marketplace is free to any company or organization in Michigan. Learn more and sign up for a free account at Michigan.MaterialsMarketplace.org.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Our next cohorts have already started their six-month program! These teams are focusing on public sector projects and recycling supply chain solutions. This group will pitch their projects at the Fall Showcase this October. And NextCycle Michigan will be back for another round with an application period for the next cohort of organic and technology solutions this fall. Be sure you are on our mailing list so you can be among the first to learn about the Fall Showcase, the upcoming application, and updates on our NextCycle alumni!