New Life for Chip Bags – a Sustainable Idea

With an alternative environmentally conscious idea, the creative and practical reuse of chip bags, students from the Nyírség region, NE Hungary, took home the top prize in the Samsung and EdisonKids Solutions for Tomorrow challenge.

The third edition of the competition saw students aged 12-18 compete in the categories of community, sustainability and future education. Out of the eight finalist teams, the NUT (Napkor's Upcycler Team) team's idea of turning chip bags into heat-resistant bags came out on top. Second place went to a modularly buildable teaching robot, and third place went to the designers of the cricket farm. The top three winners will receive a total of HUF 6 million worth of Samsung equipment for themselves, their trainer and their school.

Samsung and EdisonKids received a record number of entries to this year's competition, with 164 teams from across the country, 559 students in total, taking the opportunity to show they will be the inventors or entrepreneurs of the future. The jury decided to select 50 teams for the semi-finals, where they started their workshops on an online community learning platform.

The participants were introduced to design thinking methodology and ways to solve unstructured problems, while their teachers provided mentoring sessions. The top eight were from Budapest, Békéscsaba, Kisunhalas, Napa and Szászvár, who were able to practice the skills of persuasive presentation in the Momentán Company's personal presentation training and to delve into the mysteries of the startup world in further workshops. Over the past months, Samsung and EdisonKids have worked with students as expert mentors on projects that showcased the diversity of young people's broad interests and creative thinking in the fields of technology development, awareness and community life.

The teams that presented at the final were tackling socially relevant issues such as the reform of the academic assessment system, the gamification of history education, the integration of pupils with special needs through mentoring networks, the digitalization of career choices and the linking of educational institutions and voluntary supporters.

The jury was most impressed by the thirteen-year-old students of the Miklós Jósika German Nationality Primary School and AMI in the village of Napkor, who were looking for a solution to a waste problem in the food industry. The separate collection of metal vapor chip bags is still an unsolved problem, as there is no proven recycling technology for this type of packaging. So, the NUT team has shown how to keep the product in circulation as long as possible instead of turning it into waste by upcycling it. They would turn empty packaging into a cooler bag or a hot-water bag after environmentally friendly cleaning. Prototypes were also featured in their presentation.