A team of McCombs undergraduate students won the grand prize in the 2009 Net Impact Re-Source Challenge. The team shared the win with an MBA team from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Business. Business Honors students Bijal Mehta (second from left), Zoe Gabbard (third from left) and Elaine Hsu (fourth from left) were the only undergraduate team to enter the competition and they beat out more than 30 MBA teams for a spot in the finals. Teams from Northwestern, MIT and Cornell joined them in the finals, hosted at Cornell University Nov. 13-14. The Re-Source Challenge asked students for innovative solutions to boost PET recycling rates on college campuses. It was sponsored by Net Impact, Nestle Waters and GreenOps. The teams created marketing plans that utilized the GreenOps tracking system, which scans the bar codes of recycled items and gives users points that they can redeem for items online and coupons to use right away. In addition, students were asked to include plans to sell Nestle re-source water, which is packaged with 25 percent recycled PET plastic. The McCombs team did all of their research on campus as if they were already implementing their plan. What they found was that bringing the GreenOps systems on to campus would be extremely difficult because of the corporate branding. "At this point we were rather disgruntled, but our sophomore team member Zoe Gabbard came up with a rather genius observation that campus is not just campus," says Mehta. "So we looked for non-UT venues that still attract lots of students, and hence we thought of the University Co-Op." The team planned to sell re-source water and place the GreenOps systems at the Co-Op to take advantage of the store's location and student foot traffic. To encourage student use the team would select five student organizations each month to partner with the project. Students who recycled with the GreenOps system could select one of those organizations to receive part of the proceeds from that recycling. The student organizations would also receive a portion of the proceeds from the re-source water sales. Finally the system would educate students on the location of on-campus recycling bins for future reference. Mehta thinks that this honesty in how difficult it would be to gain access to campus helped them secure the grand prize. "We were honest to Nestle and GreenOps and the other judges about weaknesses we saw in this system [and] we didn't sugar coat how hard bringing this system to campus will be," says Mehta. "Our honest approach was what makes me the most proud of our accomplishment." The team won $5,000 to implement their plan at UT as well as a trip to Connecticut to present the idea to the CEO of Nestle Waters. Congratulations, team!