Q&A with 2020 Randall Family Big Idea Competition grand prize team Polycarbin, to discuss how 3 medical school students became entrepreneurs & their next steps in reducing the amount of biomedical waste that ends up in landfills or incinerated.

Q&A with 2020 Randall Family Big Idea Competition grand prize-winning team, Polycarbin, to discuss how 3 medical school students became entrepreneurs and what their next steps are to bring to life their idea to reduce the amount of biomedical waste that ends up in landfills or incinerated.  Read full original Pitt Big Idea Center blog post.

As you were studying to be doctors, when did you realize you also wanted to be entrepreneurs?

As training physician-scientists with 20 years of combined laboratory research experience, we have learned that important discoveries are often born of simple questions. Last summer, the three of us were discussing our respective research projects and the topic of biomedical plastic waste came up–”what happens to all our plastic waste?” After an appraisal of our own laboratory waste streams and additional market research, we were shocked by the extent to which the scientific community is dependent on single-use plastics. Our curiosity evolved into a moral imperative as we discovered the environmental and public health consequences of the biomedical plastic lifecycle.

We did not set out to be entrepreneurs, rather, we came to medical school and pursued science to analyze, understand and solve problems. The biomedical plastic crisis happens to be an enormous problem, that affects countless Americans as well as the global population, and we think we have a solution.

How did your team come up with your big idea?

At first, we wanted to devise a way to recycle biomedical plastics to create a more sustainable research environment at Pitt. We quickly realized the enormity of the problem required a scalable solution. Our team came to the conclusion that the only way to fix the biomedical plastic crisis was to show the scientific community and the industrial producers of these products that it wasn’t just more environmentally responsible to recycle these materials, but more financially responsible as well….

Polycarbin’s goal is to reshape waste management infrastructure in the health sciences with our diversion platform. We are a software-enabled sustainability company that will give the scientific community the first real opportunity to recycle biomedical plastics and reduce the carbon footprint of innovation. Using a diversion platform informed by waste analytics, Polycarbin is making recycling both habitual and profitable.

What are the next steps for your team and how will the winnings be applied?

Our team will be taking a leave of absence from medical school in order to pursue Polycarbin full-time. With our $25k cash prize, we will finish developing the minimum viable product of our waste analytics platform. This product will be crucial for demonstrating the scalability of our business model as it will allow us to remotely monitor and maintain the value of our plastic streams. Our software will be deployed in the fall during a paid pilot study with one of our corporate partners. Our goal is to demonstrate that, at scale, Polycarbin can segregate highly valuable biomedical plastic from the regulated medical waste (RMW) stream and turn it back into laboratory products.

Read the full original Pitt Big Idea Center blog post.