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.

“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.”

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.