Emergent Entrepreneurs at Glen-Con
Glendale Academy is a prestigious institution in Hyderabad that recently started a Glen conference in which they were eleven events: Pitch your Plan, Adzap, Ninety Seconds to Frame, Theory to Tangible, jingle all the Way, Science on Stage, Digital Art, Life on Focus, Real to Reel, Fashion Fiesta, and Mélange. Three Pathways School Gurgaon students – Arjun Shrivastava, Ketan Pandey, and Raghav Marwah – competed in the Pitch Your Plan event and placed third.
For our plan, we aimed to reduce the environmental damage caused by cigarette butts by 3D-printing them into coffee cups and selling them on a website. When you walk around your neighborhood, you will see a lot of toxic cigarette waste lying around to be swept away. Cleaning it up manually clears only a small percentage of the actual waste – the rest ends up in gutters, which leads to pollution, threats to waterways and marine life, or other environmental impacts. Many are not even aware that cigarette butts are made from plastic, which makes them very hard to biodegrade. Rather than tossing them away, researchers have devised a method to recycle cigarette butts by removing all nine toxic components present and repurposing them to create new goods such as can cushions, toys and a variety of other items. Keeping this principle in mind, our firm (BUTTR) came up with a technology to 3D-print coffee mugs out of these cigarette butts and sell them on our site.
It was a fantastic experience. We figured out all of the finances, which was a strenuous task in itself – I had no idea a business could have so many variables. Next, we designed a prototype – as shown above. Furthermore, we had to create a pitch to get the judges to invest in our company – this helped us realise how much research goes into creating a business strategy. The judges were enthralled by the concept and asked several questions, including, “what will you do with the discarded toxins – would you return them to the earth?” In response, Arjun had discovered that ashes can be used to produce bricks, and we presented the same as an answer. This was the turning point in our pitch since all of the judges appeared to embrace the idea, although they were initially hesitant about the marketing. However, my teammate Ketan had done an excellent job of persuading them by outlining the safe approach and other details.
We felt like real entrepreneurs while giving our presentations!
Overall, it was an enjoyable and instructive endeavour, and I want to participate in more competitions such as this one in the future.
Raghav Marwah, DP1
