In recent years, environmental protection has received increasing attention from the society. Since 2014, China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation and Mars Wrigley Confectionery (China) Co., Ltd. have launched the “Trash in Bin” national competition and “Trash in Bin” carnival in Chinese colleges and universities. The program aims to bring together young students, who are creative, enthusiastic about environmental protection, to use business thinking model and creativity to design environmental protection programs and promote philanthropy practices. Through the program, they will cultivate their entrepreneurial spirit and call upon more residents to join environmental protection activities.

2018-2019 Annual Mars Wrigley “Trash in Bin” National Competition has attracted a total of 1,316 teams to participate. Teams are selected through a complicated competition system: the university scale competition, regional competition, national preliminary competition, pilot programs in community and national finals.

On April 12th, the finals were held in the lecture hall of the Beijing Forestry University. The team from South-Central Minzu University won the competition due to its creative program design and excellent on-site performance, which were appreciated by the judges from Mars Wrigley Confectionery (China) Co., Ltd., social venture capital, and environmental protection organizations.

The champion team receiving the prize

This year’s contest was based on the idea of “Trash in Bin”, calling on college students to pay attention to the environmental problems in school or in neighborhood communities, and to design effective solutions and practice their solutions in two months. In national finals, these projects were evaluated by the on-site result performance. Different from previous years, this year's evaluation criteria added a new criteria, which is the assessment of the student team's “business thinking model”. In this context, the final 20 team's programs need to have more long-term influence and be more feasible: the team from Huazhong Agricultural University set up advertising places on the bags, put a large number of bags into the supermarket appealing to consumers to use App to pay 8 yuan as rent to use them. They also set up an electronic recycling box which only charged 0.01 yuan rent for people to use them. The team from Southwest Minzu University had focused on the issue of tens of thousands of tons of fish waste and the problem of formaldehyde pollution. It has created a brand of fish gel paint that is truly formaldehyde-free, opening up a new paint market. This not only solves the problem of fish waste, but also reduces environmental pollution.

Student presenting on stage

From 2014 to 2019, the “Trash in Bin” program has gone through five years. Wang Peng, Deputy Executive Director of China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation, concluded that "this year's competition emphasis more on innovative thinking and program sustainability, and that is more challenging. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the enthusiasm of the students is not diminished. As the organizers, we focus on the growth of young people throughout the competition process."

Wang Peng, Deputy Executive Director of China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation, giving a speech

In addition, Gary TENG-China Corporate Affairs Vice President at Marshall Wings, said that “all along, Mars Wrigley has been committed to working with partners to promote environmental protection ideas and work together to create a greener, cleaner community. In the past five years, the “Trash in Bin” project has participated in environmental protection practice activities by convening the most innovative and practical college students in the society achieving the dual goals of supporting youth development and protecting the environment. In the future, we will continue to work with the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation to fight for the Green Earth!"

Gary TENG China Corporate Affairs Vice President at Marshall Wings giving a speech

In order to continue supporting the philanthropic project of the students’ team, the contest also invited Guo Libing, managing partner of Cybernaut, to select the “most valuable team” of this competition from the perspective of a professional investor. The team's project will enter the Cybernaut list and will likely receive at least $800,00 investment in the future.

Winner of the most valuable team

Additionally, the competition also provided internship opportunities for college students. Yang Yuliang, director of the Mars Human Resource Sharing Service Center, presented the “Mars 2019 Summer Intern Project Pass Cards” to three outstanding students from the competition. They will be exempted from the resume screening and initial test process, and directly get the opportunity to the final round interview of the internship.

Yang Xinliang giving internship pass card to the winning students

During the half-year competition, young students began to discover solutions, present solutions, and finally put their programs into practice. The process cultivated their creativity, teamwork ability and social responsibility. This has made tangible efforts to promote environmental protection consciousness and jointly create a greener and cleaner community environment. After the finals, the champion team will also have the opportunity to go to the world's advanced waste sorting and advocacy areas to carry out an "environmental communication trip", and learn the advanced experience and cases of "proper disposal of garbage".