Carson Murray – Podeko Advanced Recycling Systems
Carson is an inventor, aspiring entrepreneur, and award winning engineering student who wants to grow his new venture idea into a full company. He is from Nova Scotia and before coming to StFX managed operations for regional and provincial sailing schools and leadership conferences.
Podeko is an advanced recycling company; it takes single serving coffee pods and through a proprietary process turns them into enhanced fertilizer, 3D-printer filament, and recycled aluminum. Until now, this waste stream has not been able to be truly recycled.
The company’s few competitors either down-cycle them into non-recyclable products, or more often burns them in waste to energy plants. Keurig alone sends approximately 10,000,000,000 pods – and growing – to landfill annually. This Northern Nova Scotia venture’s objective is to be the primary diverter and recycler for this waste stream in Atlantic Canada. Eventually the firm plans on franchising the intellectual property of their process to other districts and countries as demand dictates. This technology can also use other available sources of coffee and plastic to continue producing filament and fertilizer in the event of supply instability.
Raphaele Tetreault-Bergeron and Phillip T’ien – Joie des Pulse
Raphaele and Phillip are a pair of enterprising nutrition students who have developed amazing products using pulses – legumes and beans. The recent graduates of St. FX with interests in dietetics, naturopathy, and product development competed along with a group of fellow students in the Mission: ImPULSEible competition. This competition asks undergraduate students to create food products using pulses as their main ingredients.
While Raphaele and Phillip initially envisioned a frozen dessert, support from the Innovation and Enterprise Centre allowed them to pivot and shift into a line of prepared food mixes.
Although Joie des Pulse is still working with pulses, creating a dry packaged baking mix requires a different approach than a frozen pulse-based dessert. Certain nutritional and compositional testing is different; rather than measuring fat content and percentage overrun, the company will be measuring protein content, fibre and moisture content. Additionally, shelf-life studies indicate fewer challenges than working with a frozen product which is much more sensitive to temperature changes and the type of packaging used.
Adam Morin – Purple Boots Gaming
Adam Morin, originally from Cornwall, ON is a current History student at St. FX. His two consuming research passions are Byzantine Empire studies and classical Greek language (Byzantium was a Greek-speaking realm) and are key to his innovative success.
Purple Boots Gaming has developed and markets a turn-based board game tentatively called Byzantium: The Game. A distinguishing feature of the middle Byzantine Empire period era in which Byzantium is based (c. 640-1081 CE) is the rich variety of backgrounds from which their emperors, male and female, arose. Shepherds, peasants, farmers, orphans, and dockworkers (to name a few) each rose from completely obscure beginnings and acquired the throne in this period, often with successful reigns, showing a remarkable level of social mobility given the wider European context of the era. Getting to the top was tough but doable, and the board game attempts to recreate this quintessentially Byzantine experience by combining rigorous, academic historical detail with entertaining and engaging gameplay. Ultimately the aim of this venture is to spread Adam’s passion for Byzantine studies to the wider public in a format which is creative, accessible, and richly detailed.