Seven entrepreneur teams in northwest Arkansas will compete for $5,000 in prize money in the first NWA Recycles pitch contest on April 21.
The pitch competition is part of Rethinking Trash: Entrepreneurship in Waste & Recycling, a free public event being held from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Botanical Garden of the Ozarks in Fayetteville.
The pitch presentations will be during the second of three segments, after a Q&A panel with several area business owners in the recycling field and followed by a lunch and keynote speaker.
Competing for a first-place prize of $4,000 and a second-place prize of $1,000 will be:
- Amaya Consulting, which aims to provide supply chain sustainability services for small businesses
- The Bandits, a group of University of Arkansas students who aim to collect, refurbish and resell used items through university housing
- Carbon Chicken Project, which aims to utilize sawmill waste and poultry litter into an agricultural soil conditioner
- Divertify, which aims to reclaim construction and demolition materials and provide them to sustainable-minded architects
- Foxfire Artisan Glass Co., which uses recycled glass bottles as refillable containers for candles
- SIEV Technologies, which aims to use a catalytic system to convert food waste into ethanol and other useful products
- WasteNaught Zero, which aims to convert conventionally unrecyclable plastic waste into fuel and other useful products
“I am excited to spread the word about these competitors’ ideas — and to hand over some useful prize money to help them come to life,” Dan Holtmeyer, recycling program manager for the Northwest Arkansas Council and the event’s organizer, said in a news release. “Ideas like these are essential to making recycling a bigger and more impactful part of our everyday lives.”
