ICUBE wins a 2024 Sustainable Action Award for the Sustainable Innovation Challenge
It’s no secret that the devastating effects of climate change are being felt around the world. From flooding and natural disasters to social inequity and injustice, researchers, students, business innovators, governments and civil society are finding innovative solutions to problems that, left unchecked, will cause irreparable damage.
ICUBE, IMI’s social entrepreneurship hub, and winner of a 2024 Sustainable Action Award, is enabling students to play a robust role in finding solutions to these issues through the Sustainable Innovation Challenge, a competition designed to drive meaningful progress in sustainability. The Sustainable Action Awards recognize teams and individuals who make tangible contributions to sustainability at the University of Toronto across all three campuses.
“Food waste, food loss and food insecurity are very real problems that Canadians face. We wanted to create awareness, but also encourage students to come up with creative solutions to solve them, in partnership with the second largest grocery chain in Canada,” says Ignacio Mongrell, Assistant Director of ICUBE. Mongrell conceived of the Challenge to bring brilliant minds from many disciplines together, engage students in hands-on experiential learning, and enable the creation of practical, innovative solutions to real-world sustainability issues faced by Canadian companies.
Partnering with Sobeys, Mongrell and his team created an innovative experiential framework for students that included mentorship, training, workshops, and reflection. Over 200 students registered forming 70 teams, leveraging critical and systems thinking to dive deeply into the complexities of food waste and potential solutions.
Participants had the opportunity to collaborate with students, industry professionals, and experts in fields from environmental science and engineering to business and design – a model designed to “spark creativity and lead to novel approaches that integrate multiple perspectives and expertise,” says Mongrell. For participants, he says, “seeing their solutions implemented, or knowing they have the potential to be adopted by companies like Sobeys, can be highly motivating and inspiring, driving them to continue pursuing sustainability innovation in the future.”
The top three winning teams were AR Environmental Solutions, Aquila Capital, and SoBeGreen. Winning proposals included a technology that converts food waste into bioethanol and organic fertilizer, a "Waste to Wealth" strategy to reduce household food waste, and a proposed B2B marketplace to enhance circularity within the supply chain by redirecting unsold, edible products to a secondary market.
IMI’s Master of Science in Sustainability Management (MScSM) students took third place with SoBeGreen, with their “Sobeys Food Cycle Platform,” an innovative idea to solve food wastage by redirecting surplus food product. Menaka Bhatia, Marlo Campbell, Siobhan Mehrotra, Helena Teng, and Chloe Wu all joined due to a deep interest in food waste, identifying it as a global issue seen and experienced around the world in varying contexts. "We thought it would be important for us to apply our creativity in finding a solution on a scale we can cover,” says the team. “We know that Sobeys is a huge corporation in Canada”, she explains, so [we worked] on a solution that we felt was practical enough for them to implement with the resources and capabilities they currently have.”
Here on campus, ICUBE's Sustainable Innovation Challenge directly supports many key priorities, including bolstering the goals of the UTM Sustainability Strategic Plan and the UTM Strategic Framework. It fosters student success through experiential learning and connecting groups who might not otherwise study and learn together and creates multi-year external partnerships. Through enhanced industry partnership, the Challenge expands sustainability education on campus, and encourages sustainability learning across disciplines. ICUBE’s efforts and impact through the Challenge were celebrated at the kick-off to UTM’s 2024 Sustainability Week, during UTM’s Climate Positive Plan Workshop, through the 2024 Sustainable Action Award (Team) by the UTM Sustainability Office.
For future graduate students thinking about engaging in this, and similar, Challenges, the SoBeGreen team highly recommends the experience. "This kind of experience is essential... as it puts you in a real-world scenario,” says the team. The skills developed “are crucial for all graduate students who will soon enter the workforce."
Learn more at https://icubeutm.ca/sic.