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Sustainability at TU
„Smash the Box Challenge“

Students present ideas for sustainable reusable solutions

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  • TU News
The winning team of the Smash the Box Challenge can be seen in a hall with high ceilings © Social Research Center Dortmund
The teams of the "Smash the Box Challenge" together with the project managers and the expert jury.
How can Dortmund residents and restaurants throughout the city succeed in using reusable tableware? In the "Smash the Box Challenge" ideas competition, students spent four months developing new answers to this question. At the final event on March 15, two students from the Department of Spatial Planning - Reda Abdelilah and Rahmat Hidayat - won over the jury with their concept for a vending machine that dispenses reusable cups, accepts them back and also washes them itself.

As part of an individual coaching session, the winning team can now flesh out this idea and check to what extent it can be implemented. The final event of the competition was organized by the Social Research Center (Sozialforschungsstelle, sfs) and the Center for Entrepreneurship & Transfer (CET) of TU Dortmund University together with the city's Economic Development Agency and Environmental Agency, and the final pitches were thus embedded in a varied program of lectures and work phases on the topic of reusable packaging.

In order to reduce waste and promote environmental protection, catering businesses have been obliged to offer reusable containers for food and drinks that they sell outside the home or at events for a good year now. As part of the "Smash the Box Challenge", students from all disciplines and semesters were invited to develop socially innovative ideas on how this so-called "obligation to offer reusable containers" can be implemented sustainably. "The Social Research Center has been researching social innovations for years. This means that social challenges can also be solved by establishing new practices," explains Marthe Zirngiebl from the Social Research Center (sfs). "In order to develop, test and disseminate ideas, the potential of society as a whole is needed and universities and their students can also play a decisive role." For this reason, the "Smash the Box Challenge" was funded as an innovative teaching project by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in the "Society of Innovation" program.

Since October 2023, the student teams have been supported by Alexandra Schmidt from CET and Marthe Zirngiebl from sfs in their idea generation process through workshops and coaching sessions. They also had to engage in confrontation formats with representatives of the city, the catering industry and start-ups that are already working on solutions for sustainable reusable logistics. During this time, the students learned to grasp the complexity of the problem, develop and evaluate ideas, develop business models - and ultimately present their solution approach successfully. The final pitch was embedded in a larger workshop on reusable use, which the "Smash the Box" project team carried out together with those responsible for the "DoZirkulär2030" project of the Dortmund Economic Development Agency, which promotes ideas for the circular economy in Dortmund.

To the Smash the Box website

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