Sus-Attainable

In the STEMworks Solutions October 2020 Pots That Rot Challenge, students were asked to create a biodegradable pot using the engineering design process. These pots needed to be able to replace the plastic pots employed by the Maui Nui Botanical Garden nursery. The Kupu Hawaii Youth Sustainability Challenge allows selected participants to receive funding, mentoring, and training for their projects. These projects were either student identified community sustainability challenges or community partnership challenges.

My team was a group of 4, who over the course of 8 months developed and iterated on a solution to the plastic plant pots used by the Maui Nui Botanical Garden nursery. The core idea we came up with was to use recycled paper as the primary material and rice glue as the component that held everything together. At first we just wet paper shavings from a shredder, put rice glue on them, and placed the shavings inside of a basic wood mold we had made. With that prototype being successful, we worked on making a more robust mold design that would produce results that more closely resembled a plant pot shape. For this we used Fusion 360 to CAD out a design for the mold and used a 3D printer to bring it to life. In order to make a more streamlined and functional plant pot, we decided on blending the recycled paper with the rice glue and water to create this sludge like compound that would work with our new 3D printed molds.

From these two challenges, I learned quite a bit about the various enivronmental problems we face and more about how people are deciding to tackle them. There’s really so many things and parts of the world that could be improved to be more environmentally safe but it requires time, money, and dedicated people. Doing these challenges are so fun and a great way for kids to start seeing the world differently. I think these kinds of challenges should be advertised more within schools, as if I didn’t volutarrily ask to participate in some challenges, I would have never known about things like this.

You can learn more at the STEMworks Solutions Challenges and the Hawaii Youth Sustainability Challenge - KUPU.