Sixteen local students in six start-up companies presented sustainable products they developed through the Green Entrepreneurial Internship Program at Pie Lab in Greensboro. The new companies placed their products for sale, then gave poster presentations in which they explained the science behind their products and outlined their business plans.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like this in my thirty years as an educator,” Dee Goldston, a University of Alabama professor of elementary science who served as an adviser to the program for the first time this year, said. “It’s a pretty phenomenal project.”

The Green Entrepreneurial Internship Program brings together people from a variety of different fields, who then collaborate on various business ventures, Goldston said. Participants in the program include UA undergraduate and graduate students and faculty, students from Holt County high schools and private sector mentors who assist the students in their business ventures.

“A lot of kids don’t get to see this kind of collaboration in their day-to-day school lives, especially in rural communities,” Goldston said. “This program provides them with valuable learning experience.”

Now that the companies have started up, the Culverhouse College of Commerce and Business will assist the students over the next year in the development of their businesses in marketing their products and understanding the economic principles they will apply and encounter.

“We hope that [the businesses will] be sustainable,” Karen Boykin of the Center for Green Manufacturing and a director of the program said. Each business was given the same sustainability goals: people, or how the product will benefit society; place, or how the product will affect the environment; and profit, or how the company will be able to make money without sacrificing either of the other two goals.

One group, AlaBamLight, developed an LED lamp constructed entirely from local bamboo, which grows abundantly in the Black Belt region. The group achieved their goal of making use of bamboo to create a product that is both sustainable and eco-friendly.

“I joined the program initially as the web master, but I grew interested in the projects,” Tarif Haque, a sophomore majoring in computer science, said. “Dr. Boykin asked me if I’d like to work with one of the teams. I gladly accepted.”

There are also some teams that are giving back to the community through donations. The 1-4-1 Team developed original T-shirt designs and an environmentally friendly nanoparticle, which will make them resistant to moisture, odor and dirt. The group will donate a shirt to a child in need for each one they sell.

Above all, though, the project served as a learning experience for those involved, the students and faculty alike.

“I need to know that I’m valuable in the real world,” Haque said. “Sometimes I get so entangled in academia, I lose sight of the business side of things. This program has inspired that one-of-a-kind business practicality in me.”