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SDSU team creates plan for biodegradable grocery bags

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SDSU team creates plan for biodegradable grocery bags


BROOKINGS, S.D. (KELO) – A group of SDSU students are back from Kenya this week after competing for a Hult Prize — which is a global program challenging college students to solve the world’s most pressing issues.

Extraordinary things can happen inside a scientific lab. For example, a plastic film made out of soybean hulls and sustainable chemicals. The hope is that one day, it could create entire grocery bags.

“Our product, bAGgy, instead of going into landfill or ocean for 500 years in order to decompose, it takes 60 days for the plastic films to decompose,” Hunter Eide, an SDSU graduate who helped create Agri-Cycle Innovations, said.

It’s a business plan created by four students at SDSU, combined with the research of Dr. Srinivas Janaswamy and his graduate students.

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“It’s going to function very similar to your regular plastic bag that for like the consumers at the end, the experience will be the same for them,” Kylie Rosenau, an SDSU student who helped create Agri-Cycle Innovations, said. “So really takes the burden of having to recycle or reuse off of them and puts it on like the manufacturers.”

They call it Agri-Cycle Innovations and it led this team to Kenya for the second round of an international contest. They were picked as one of 360 teams out of 10,000 around the world to advance for the Hult Prize.

“I always like believed in our team and what we put together, but it’s like when you know there’s that many people and so many incredible ideas coming into this, it’s not like we were over-confident by any means,” Rosenau said. “So, it was really just kind of confirmed that, yeah, we’ve put something great together.”

Unfortunately, the SDSU team did not win the one million dollar grand prize, but they are proud of what they created.

“Oftentimes, it seems like the world is in a lot of crisis, there’s a lot of bad things, but you know, what can we as young and the next generation do to help positively change,” Eide said. “And continue to do it in a way to generate business and the economy in order to go forward with that.”

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The students say soybean hulls were picked because it’s the part of the soybean that isn’t used for food or animal feed. So, it can be used without farmers having to plant more crop in order to make the bags.



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South Dakota

Sioux Falls Public Safety Campus holding SD Law Enforcement Academy

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Sioux Falls Public Safety Campus holding SD Law Enforcement Academy


SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (Dakota News Now) – The Sioux Falls Public Safety Campus is now hosting the state’s Law Enforcement Academy.

The academy trains cadets in the 13-week basic certification course.

In the past, participants would have to travel to Pierre to partake in training.

“The instructors for this course of training is local law enforcement, so people actively doing the job here in Sioux Falls or the Sioux metro will be the instructors,” said Lt. Jessica Speckmeier.

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Cadets will complete training in September and then return to their communities as state certified officers.



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Events in Eureka, Geddes, Highmore, Mobridge and Pierre/Fort Pierre receive Travel South Dakota Awards Tourism Grants

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Events in Eureka, Geddes, Highmore, Mobridge and Pierre/Fort Pierre receive Travel South Dakota Awards Tourism Grants


Travel South Dakota’s Tourism Advertising Promotion (TAP) Grant program has awarded a total of $163,110 to assist the state’s tourism industry and increase visitation to tourism-related events.

The purpose of the TAP Grant program is to provide marketing funds to tourism-related events such as festivals, concerts, rodeos, and powwows. This grant program is focused on providing funding to events in smaller towns, cities, and rural areas of the state, but entities and events of all sizes were encouraged to apply. The grants range from $1,000 to $10,000.

Award recipients include: Arlington Days (Arlington), Rally Event in Belle Fourche (Belle Fourche), Deadwood Mardi Gras (Deadwood), Eurekafest (Eureka), South Dakota Chislic Festival (Freeman), Jesse James Days (Garretson), Geddes 125th Anniversary/Geddes Fur Trader Days (Geddes), Sunflower Festival (Highmore), 1880 Train Holiday Express (Hill City), Irene Rodeo (Irene), The Haunting of Keystone (Keystone), Neutrino Day (Lead), Sitting Bull Stampede (Mobridge), Back Forty Beef and Adventure Farm (Pierpont), Oahe Winter Festival (Pierre/Fort Pierre), Chinook Days (Spearfish), Sturgis Art Festival & Legendary Sturgis Battle of the Bands (Sturgis), Pumpkin Fest (Webster), and Mazing Acres’ Fall Festival (Yankton).

Tourism Secretary Jim Hagen says events of all sizes and kinds will be able to use these funds to celebrate the unique parts of our state. He says he’s excited to provide assistance to these amazing South Dakota events.

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For more information about the Tourism Advertising Promotion Grant, visit SDVisit.com/TAP.



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Explaining the lawsuit against South Dakota’s abortion-rights ballot measure

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Explaining the lawsuit against South Dakota’s abortion-rights ballot measure


BY: SETH TUPPER

PIERRE, S.D. (South Dakota Searchlight) – A new court fight over South Dakota’s abortion-rights ballot measure could hinge on a complicated answer to a simple question: Does a set of six-year-old petition requirements still exist?

The court fight started Thursday, when the Life Defense Fund filed a lawsuit in state court. The lawsuit challenges the legitimacy of a citizen-initiated Nov. 5 ballot question that would reinstate abortion rights. The Life Defense Fund is a ballot question committee organized to oppose the measure.

Dakotans for Health is the ballot question committee that supports the measure and gathered the petition signatures to put it on the ballot. Instead of filing a response in state court, Dakotans for Health asked a federal judge on Tuesday to intervene on its behalf. To understand why, it’s necessary to retrace a series of legislative and court battles dating to 2018.

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That’s when the Republican-dominated Legislature enacted restrictions on the petition process that citizens use to place measures on the ballot. The restrictions were intended to prevent non-South Dakotans from circulating petitions, in part by requiring petitioners to provide information proving their South Dakota residency.

One year later, in 2019, some lawmakers said out-of-state petitioners were circumventing the law. So the Legislature repealed part of the 2018 law and replaced it with a new law. Among other things, the 2019 law required all petition circulators to publicly disclose personal information including their address, email and phone number.

A ballot question committee, SD Voice, and a liberal blogger, Cory Heidelberger, successfully sued to block the 2019 law. They said the law violated their First Amendment free speech rights, had a chilling effect on petition circulators, and imposed “unwarranted new restrictions on the ballot measure process, for the purpose of further consolidating power in South Dakota’s dominant political party.”

In 2020, legislators responded with another new law applying similar requirements, but only to paid petition circulators. Dakotans for Health successfully sued to block that law. A federal appellate judge in the case wrote, “While South Dakota has important interests in protecting the integrity of the ballot initiative process, it has no interest in enforcing overbroad restrictions that likely violate the Constitution.”

Both the 2019 and 2020 laws included a 30-day residency requirement for petition circulators. That specific requirement was challenged in yet another lawsuit, filed by the League of Women Voters. The league agreed to drop its narrower lawsuit when Dakotans for Health succeeded with its wider suit.

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According to the Life Defense Fund, the end result of all that lawmaking and litigating is that the original 2018 law still stands. It’s still “good law,” the group claims, because none of the subsequent bills that sought to repeal or amend it are currently in force. Those bills were challenged by opponents and blocked by the courts.

The Life Defense Fund therefore asserts that the abortion-rights petitioners were obligated to comply with the 2018 law, which requires sworn statements including information proving the petitioners’ South Dakota residency. The Life Defense Fund says Dakotans for Health failed to obey that law, and “therefore the entire petition is disqualified.”

Dakotans for Health says the Life Defense Fund lawsuit is an illegal attempt to resurrect the 30-day residency requirement for petitioners and “flout” the related court decisions. That’s why Dakotans for Health is asking a federal judge to prevent any state court from enforcing the residency requirement.

There are other allegations in the Life Defense Fund lawsuit: petition circulators failed to provide a required handout to signers, some signatures were counted as valid even though they’d been crossed out on the petition, some signers didn’t list the county where they’re registered to vote, some signers were allegedly duped into thinking they were signing a petition about repealing the sales tax on groceries, and so on.

“This will be proven by witness testimony,” Sara Frankenstein, the attorney for the Life Defense Fund, told South Dakota Searchlight.

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Dakotans for Health, represented by attorney Jim Leach, asserts that the Life Defense Fund’s other allegations are insufficient to achieve its aim of removing the abortion-rights measure from the ballot. The petition circulator residency questions are “critical to the possible success” of the lawsuit, Dakotans for Health says in its federal court memorandum.

Nancy Turbak Berry, a Democratic former legislator who leads a coalition advocating for the ballot measure, panned the Life Defense Fund’s legal strategy.

“It is a press release masquerading as a lawsuit, designed solely to allow the opponents of reproductive freedom to peddle more inflammatory lies,” she said.

Dakotans for Health filed its ballot petition in May with about 55,000 signatures. The Secretary of State’s Office validated the petition after sampling the signatures and estimating that 46,098 of them were from South Dakota registered voters — more than the 35,017 needed to qualify for the ballot.

Abortions are currently banned in South Dakota, except to “preserve the life of the pregnant female.” The ballot measure would legalize abortions in the first trimester of pregnancy but allow the state to impose limited regulations in the second trimester and a ban in the third trimester, with exceptions for the life and health of the mother.

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South Dakota Searchlight’s Joshua Haiar contributed to this report.



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