Business Students Take on Green Challenges
Judy Zhang and Kyle Yan, undergraduates from the Faculty of Business Administration, came second in the Green Competition organized by the Cross-Strait Green University Consortium with their green app Duo-la, a virtual flea market that allows students to buy and sell used products.
1. Tell us about the competition.
: The Cross-Strait Green University Consortium consists of CUHK, National Central University (NCU), and Nanjing University. The 3 institutions take turns to host the Green Competition in their cities. NCU is hosting the event this year, so 14 teams of student participants gathered in Taoyuan to demonstrate our innovative solutions for protecting the environment.
2. Describe your prize-winning project Duo-la.
: It is a mobile app for selling and buying used products. Sellers list their unwanted things and reach buyers through the app. It provides a solution to the gargantuan amount of waste caused by students upon moving out of their dormitories at the end of each academic year. Every May they throw away a lot of stuff that they cannot take home, and then in September, we see students shop around to buy more things.
3. What makes Duo-la different from other similar platforms?
: All CUHK Colleges have their own recycling programmes in place. But students of College A may have no idea that the items they need can be found in College B. Duo-la facilitates communication among students from various Colleges. What’s more, the existing green organizations can also list their collected items on Duo-la for a wider distribution.
If the app runs well in CUHK, we will further promote it to other universities to enable a trans-campus trading.
4. How is the National Central University doing on sustainability?
: I am most impressed by their segregation of waste. To recycle a milk carton, Taiwan students go to the trouble of taking three steps: squeeze the leftover milk in the kitchen bin; throw the straw and its plastic sleeve in the garbage; and finally, place the carton in the appropriate bin based on the recycling label on the package. After each meal, Taiwan students are willing to spend as much as five minutes in trash sorting, which is mind-blowing for students from Hong Kong and the mainland.
5. Share with us other innovative projects presented by your rivals.
: I like the ‘Keyboard Fighter’ idea from another CUHK team. They proposed to invent a keyboard that harvests energy from the tapping of keys and use it for charging mobile phones and electronic devices. Another remarkable project is ‘Grow Glow Stick’. This team came up with replacing the chemicals inside the glow sticks with light-emitting microorganisms, which provides a solution to the environmental hazards caused by the disposal of traditional glow sticks.
It was uplifting to listen to all those cool ideas. I realized protecting the environment can be fun at the same time.
6. When will you launch Duo-la?
: Duo-la’s website is up and running, but the development of its mobile application is pending our engineering teammates who are in their final year and busy applying for jobs or graduate schools. I hope we can focus on building the app next semester and get it launched in a year.