Canadian college cuts waste with “hackathon” competition

GUELPH, Canada — Waste of food is a ubiquitous problem university students tackled over the weekend at a "hackathon" competition in the University of Guelph's Summerlee science complex.

The team of Ian Dingle, Brandon Guild and Trevor Baron was determined to come up with practical solutions. They were diligently brainstorming, vying for top honours against other groups of post-secondary students.

Dingle's team proposed ways of linking those with excess food to others who could make good use of it through new online resources.

"The idea is to spread awareness and give people easy access," Dingle said Saturday as the food waste challenge kicked off.

Participants gathered Saturday morning to learn what the specific challenge was – in this case food waste on campus. They had 24 hours to develop strategic and software solutions, with teams comprising two to four participants. Each team had to have one student from the university's computer science school and one from a separate college at the university. Technical and other experts were on hand to offer guidance.

The clock started ticking at 11 a.m.

On Sunday afternoon, organizers announced the overall winning team, comprising Viktoria Cermanova, Nicholas Durish, Michael Wojitas and Garbriel Pothier-Maudsley, for an app they called the "Smartbin" system for the campus. It calculates organic food waste and the financial loss this represents to the school.

There were two runner-up teams, Food Institute communications co-ordinator Maggie McCormick reported. Lauren Jans, Sarah Shepherd, Angela Pang and Aftab Ahmad created "MagicBin," which also calculates food waste and cost, but then helps create a social norm around avoiding such loss.

The team of Ben Douek and Adrian D'Alessandro created "FoodFinder," a geographical tagging app to identify the location of dumpsters in Guelph where waste food might be found.

Helping oversee the hackathon, geography assistant professor Kat Parizeau said food is