April 13–14: U.S. China Social Enterprise Summit

I wo uld like to share the Pitch Competition and my own project with you.

On April 13^th, all of our 30 ECSEL fellows had an opportunity to present their own projects of their social entrepreneurship ideas. We were divided into three groups and each group presented and discussed in separate conference rooms. In each group, all ECSEL fellows presented their own ideas for five minutes and the rest of the group gave the presenter both critical and positive comments which would help presenters improve their projects. Each group selected two students to present in the pitch competition on the following day. In our group, I was extremely impressed by every creative and feasible idea from our fellows. We discussed ardently and experienced many difficulties to decide which one was the best. On the following day, six selected students had a chance to present their ideas in front of several judges and Angel Investors. Luckily, I was one of these six students. It was exciting to share my idea with all fellows and judges and got so useful feedback from them.

My project is about the treatment of alkali reduction wastewater which are produced by textile printing and dyeing factories within membrane integration technique. One and a half year ago, I found that there are many textile printing and dyeing factories in China, most of which are located in Zhejiang Province. Most wastewater treatment companies are unable to treat the wastewater produced by textile printing and dyeing factories because it has too much chemical raw material and pigments, the most difficult part is that there is not an efficient way to treat alkali reduction wastewater. In the meantime, the discharge is too huge and the management is too poor.

After analyzing the market, I talked to a professor who is an expert in the wastewater treatment field in China. We worked on the solutions together with some doctors and came up with an effective way to deal with the alkali reduction wastewater problem.  We designed an equipment to process the textile printing and dyeing wastewater which will reduce 90% wastewater and 70% COD. What’s more, it can recycle very useful chemical raw material – 85% purity TA. After further processing these QTA, we can get 95-98% purity QTA, which can be broadly used as raw material in industrial fields. This process turns waste into treasure.

I built up an entrepreneurship team to work on this project. As the team leader, I led two doctors, five masters and two undergraduate students negotiated with government and persuaded them to donate 500,000 Yuan to build up a Demonstration Project in a real textile printing and dyeing factory. It has been greatly praised by the local government, equipment users and the Chinese Economy Newspaper. The demonstration project has effectively proved that our equipment can be transformed to a real business and should be applied to as many factories as possible in order to reduce the unmanageable wastewater.

Since those companies spent lots of money on dealing with wastewater but still got unsatisfied results. I am thinking about opening a company and provide the treatment equipment to the textile printing and dyeing companies for free. In this way, we will help them save a huge cost on wastewater. We will recycle QTA which are produced from the wastewater and then sell them with a low price to some industrial companies as needed. We make contributions to the environment, help companies save money and gain profit as well. As you can see, the positive impacts are not only on environmental benefits, but also social and economical benefits.

After five minutes presentation, four judges gave their feedback to us regarding to our projects, presentations and future developments. I got to know how to make a more effective and pursuable pitch in very few minutes. We need to give more figures during the presentation to directly show the feasibility and profitability of out projects. After watching the others' presentations, I was so inspired by their projects and learned a lot from their ideas.