SDSU team takes soybean hull-based plastics to global competition

A team of South Dakota State University students is on to something that could add value to a soybean byproduct that currently has little if any value. The four recently competed in Nairobi, Kenya, for the $1 million Hult Prize. Considered by some to be the Nobel Prize for high-achieving college students, the Hult Prize is a global competition that challenges young people to solve the world’s most pressing issues through social entrepreneurship. The SDSU team, with the help of academic staff, developed a business plan to make biodegradable, single-use plastic bags out of soybean hulls.

“We’ve effectively made plastic from soybeans, which is super exciting,” said Hunter Eide, who recently graduated from SDSU and aspires to a career in medicine. “We know that it biodegrades within 60 days of going into the soil with the microbes.”

With the proposed company name of Agri-Cycle Innovations, soybean growers should be excited about the product, according to Eide.

“I’d be stoked,” said Eide, who grew up on a row-crop and cow-calf operation outside Gettysburg, South Dakota. “Talking to my family members who are still on the farm, my Uncle Brandon and cousins are super excited. It provides another thing that’s value-added to the market, an exciting opportunity and venture.”

Although the SDSU students did not advance to the finals, to be held later this year in London, the team was among 360 teams worldwide, narrowed from a field of 10,000 teams originally entered. The competition draws more than 100,000 young people from more than 100 countries.

“We’re extremely lucky, but holy cow, we put in the work,” said team member Samuel Hadacek, an agricultural economics major from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, who also sees the biodegradable plastic film as a win for soybean growers.

"As we create another market for soybeans and soybean hulls themselves, that will increase overall demand from the soybean processing plants because they have to feed a new market,” said Hadacek.

Team members designated themselves to positions in their proposed company that address individual strengths and skill sets. Eide is the CEO as well as the company’s health impacts specialist. Hadacek is vice president of agricultural commodities and finance. Nicole Schilling, of St. Peter, Minnesota is the COO as well as the chief science officer. Kylie Rosenau from Blue Earth, Minnesota, a junior in biochemistry pre-medicine, is vice president of sustainability and environmental impact. Rosenau is confident the product can be scaled up and commercialized because it’s sustainable.

“One thing: I think [plastic films made from soybean hulls] helps the producers and the farmers as well as the end consumer because we as consumers don’t have to feel guilty about utilizing plastics,” Rosenau told the South Dakota Soybean Network. “It is all biodegradable and makes that choice a lot easier.”

Nairobi, Kenya, where the SDSU team competed, was among nine cities around the world hosting 40 teams each. Winners from each of the nine contest sites advanced to the finals in London. The team advancing from the Nairobi competition is from Zimbabwe’s Africa University.

The SDSU students were accompanied by SDSU professor Srinivas Janaswamy, a member of the team’s advisory board. According to Janaswamy, the new product benefits farmers, because it adds value to something that currently has no value.

“I’m pretty sure that would change the whole scenario of how [farmers] could make more money from the product that they have been discarding so far that they have been not getting enough value from, frankly,” said Janaswamy.

Having a team advance to the level of competition achieved by the SDSU team is remarkable, but it is also a feather in the cap for South Dakota’s land grant institution.

“SDSU is in the top 3.6% in the world,” said Rebecca Bott-Knutson, dean of the Van D. and Barbara B. Fishback Honors College, in a news release, “and that’s really extraordinary.”