Hack Your Waste, Chandigarh
Chandigarh witnesses a Battle against Food Waste.
With the pledge to stop food wastage, 50 diverse minds from Chandigarh united for the city’s first OpenIDEO ‘Hack Your Waste’ event on the pleasant evening of September 11 at Innov8 Coworking Chandigarh. All that because of one astounding reason:
Food is a core part of the human experience but ignorance and leniency is leading it to rather landfill sites than stomachs. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, approximately 33 million tonnes food makes its way to dustbins.
Sadly, with dumps full of rotten vegetables and hotels throwing away excess food, this issue has hit bottom over the period of time.
Hack Your Waste | OpenIDEO was organized to bring people together on one platform and help them design innovative solutions for optimum usage of surplus food and reduce food wastage. The challenge was:
The event was divided into two fragments: a Panel Discussion and a Design Thinking Hackathon. The panel consisted of Taranjeet Singh Bhamra (MD, AgNext), Angad Singh (TMT Manager, Feeding India), Vivek Mehra (Founder, I am still human), who lay the foundation of the challenge at hand and how the world and the society is looking at it.
The Three Panelists: Taranjeet Bhamra (L), Angad Singh (C) and Vivek Mehra (R).
The Hackathon encouraged participants to think about challenges and solutions in two broad sectors: Production (before food reaches the consumer) and Consumption (after the food reaches the consumer). The organizing team researched numerous internationally-applied models and ultimately sketched an action-packed 7-step design thinking process: Choose, Research, Define, Ideate, Validate, Refine, and Pitch. Eight teams, each led by a mentor, steered through the process to explore options that are realistic, tangible and, most importantly, human-centered.
“We are extremely happy to have supported such an event, which genuinely needs attention and voice”, Sehaj, Innov8 Chandigarh.
The event was organised by Paper and Ink Centre for Design (PICD), in association with Yellow Cursor, on the OpenIDEO platform. OpenIDEO is a community (and a brainchild of IDEO) which takes a human-centered, collaborative approach to design solutions for the world’s biggest challenges.
‘Hack Your Waste’ turned out to be an informative and a successful affair. It managed to receive applauds and words of appreciation from everyone present. The participants came up with some really smart and innovative solutions. The best ideas would be eligible for a $25,000 award to help the teams in implementation.
“Before this event, I had never thought food wastage was even an issue. Really fortunate to a part of it,” quoted Divya, an event participant. The city definitely needs more such events which bring everyone under one roof to think for a sustainable development for every lethal global issue.
At the end of the event, everyone took a short pledge: I, [Name], a citizen of this beautiful planet Earth, pledge to do my part and to the best of my ability, to reduce food waste.
How would you describe today's experience?
This article was originally published on Facebook by Yellow Cursor in 2016.