Over the past year, I have participated in many different business competitions, learning several new things from each competition. Even though there have been competitions that my group members and I didn’t necessarily enjoy, they still proved to be valuable as we learned to adjust our product to very detailed guidelines.

A new business competition we have been slowly picking apart, is arguably one of the most prestigious of them all, the Conrad challenge. Unlike many of the other competitions I have participated in, the guidelines for Conrad allow maximum flexibility. It is not required to create a product that would benefit the environment, help refugees in different countries, etc. 

Despite none of these aspects being required, my group members and I still made sure to incorporate one or more of them into our product. Since it was indeed the environmental/social benefit on top of the profit that brought my business competition group together in the first place, drifting from these values felt immoral in a sense. 

During our many brainstorming sessions, we decided that we wanted our product to have some type of an environmental benefit. After some time, we concluded that we would focus on a product that absorbs CO2, similar to trees. In a densely populated city like New York, where there aren’t that many trees to begin with, carbon dioxide emissions have proven to be a massive problem. Many people, myself included, thought that absorbing CO2 in big cities would be near impossible due to there being no space for trees. We realized that roads, buildings, and subway stations take up the majority of space in big cities, but we somehow needed to find a way to use this to our advantage. Cement was a common link that we found. Considering that 2 million cubic yards of cement are used each year in New York City alone, if we could somehow find a way to make this cement absorb CO2, the benefit would be incomprehensible. 

Upon further research, we realized that if we mix materials like Limestone, Dolomite and  calcium hydroxide into the cement, it would be able to retain its strength, while also absorbing copious amounts of CO2. Although Dolomite and Calcium Hydroxide can be obtained at relatively low costs, limestone does not have this advantage. 

Since we are still in the early stages of this competition, our short term goal is to find a cheaper substitute for Limestone in our cement mixture. Even though limestone is one of the most effective materials for absorbing CO2, its price makes it very difficult to produce CO2 absorbing cement in bulk, and have it compete well with its competitor of regular cement.