Three teenage boys in New York City have invented a clever packaging material that they hope will replace toxic plastics and make plastic-free shipping a reality.
Zhi Han (Anthony) Yao, Flint Mueller, and James Clare are planning to pursue a patent and eventually pitch their product to Home Depot, as well as traditional shippers like Amazon, FedEx, and the US Postal Service.
They call their geometric, cardboard invention Kiriboard, since it’s inspired by Japanese kirigami, which is the art of cutting and folding paper.
“Something like this is the wave of the future,” Jerry Citron, the teenagers’ environmental-science teacher, told Business Insider.
Yao, Mueller, and Clare won the Earth Prize on April 8, making them one of seven winning environmental projects by teenagers across the globe. The award comes with $12,500, which they plan to use to buy a cutting machine, called a CNC router, and test more prototypes.
Plastic-free shipping could change the world
Just like any plastic, Styrofoam and other plastic packaging can shed microscopic bits of plastic into homes and the environment.
Microplastics have been detected from the oceans to the top of Mount Everest, in animals’ and humans’ body tissues and blood, and even in rain all over the planet. They’re associated with heart attack and stroke risk. Some researchers suspect they could even be contributing to the recent rise in colon cancers in young people.
“I didn’t realize it was as big of an issue as it was,” Yao told BI. “I mean, companies have made sustainable initiatives and greener initiatives, but they haven’t really fully replaced plastic packaging.”
Enter the Kiriboard: Kiriboard is cut into lattice-like shapes so that it can bend to fill the space between an item and the wall of its box. The cuts give the cardboard a three-dimensional structure that makes it sturdy and allows it to bend and absorb impact, protecting what’s inside, similar to bubble wrap but without the plastic.
Once perfected, the three teens hope their design can help ship packages of sensitive or heavy equipment even more securely, at a competitive price.
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Broken motors and crumple zones
Clare, Mueller, and Yao are all on the same robotics team at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. Clare is a junior, and Mueller and Yao are seniors.
The idea for Kiriboard started when they opened a shipment of Kraken X60 motors, which are about $200 a pop. They found that the brass pins, which connect the motors to a robot, were damaged and unusable. They assumed the pins had been damaged in transit.
“We’re like, well, we should do something about this packaging, because clearly the packaging wasn’t good enough,” Mueller said.
Clare thought about how cars are engineered with crumple zones, meant to absorb the energy of impacts to protect the people inside.
Similarly, he said, “you can make strategic weak points in your packaging so that the package warps and deforms,” sparing the package’s contents.
With help from the Earth Prize program and Citron, they built and tested their first Kiriboard prototypes.
The matrix
It was a scrappy effort, with cardboard scavenged from their school.
After some research and consulting various teachers, Yao said they drew up eight or nine different designs, and narrowed down to four to build and test. Then, came the fun part: dropping heavy stuff on their creations.
To test their prototypes’ durability, the teens slammed them with a roll of tape, a stapler, a can of soda, and a metal water bottle — “which did the most damage, but not as much as we thought it would,” Clare said.
They dropped each item onto the Kiriboard prototypes from various heights, so that they could calculate and study the physical forces of each impact.
“Basically, we want to see what’s the most amount of force it can take before it snaps,” Yao said.
The results were promising, the trio said. The Kiriboard prototypes sustained very little damage, which they judged by checking the cardboard for dents. They plan to move forward with all four designs, which they hope will be useful for different types of shipping.
In the design pictured above, four triangular “legs” hold the Kiriboard in place inside a box.
“This middle section, we call it the matrix. This is supposed to be flexible,” Yao said. Once you place an item for shipping inside the box, the matrix “is supposed to form to the product.”
Once they’ve purchased a CNC router to automate cutting the cardboard, they plan to test prototypes by actually shipping them in boxes.
“Right now, we want to perfect our product,” Yao said.
When it’s ready, they said they might also pitch it to the electronics company AndyMark, which shipped them the robotic motors that arrived broken.
“No shade to them,” Clare said, adding that their robotics team frequently orders from AndyMark with no problems.
“We’re on the brink of, like, this could become a reality, and it’s just up to us to put in that final effort,” Mueller said. Clare chimed in: “All from a broken package.”
