Crush No More!

"You won't believe it!"

The Problem

The problem we are currently addressing is the crushed cereal at the bottom of cereal bags. We are focusing on this problem not only because it annoys many people around the world. Also because the crumbs at the bottom of the cereal bag are thrown away and it is just a big waste of food. We cannot solve world hunger, however this is just a small step in the right direction.

How We Got Here

This was not the original project that we decided on. We went through many ideas until we got to this project. We first debated between turbine wheels or cell phone cleaners and which one helped our environment more. We finally decided on self cleaning cellphone cases. We did lots of research and surveys to receive data on how we should do it. Finally we found out that something like that exists and we had to go back to square one. One of our original ideas was to reduce the amount of crushed cereal that is at the bottom of the bag. We threw that idea out at first, because we wanted something more appealing to middle students. We ended up going back to that idea when we realized it was much bigger than just crumbs. After a bit of research, we decided it was not a bad idea to work on this project as it addressed food waste as well as ethical packaging. Nothing like our project existed yet and it seemed very doable. That is how we ended up with this topic.

How We Plan to Solve This Problem

While we were conducting trials for this project, we tested if air in the bag had any effect with the crushed cereal, and it does in a way. The reason the crushed cereal happens in the first place is because the cereal has to much space to move and rubs up against the other cereal, which causes it to break down to crumbs. The way we propose to fix this problem is by taking the bag and removing most of the air from bag. Enough air so that it does not crush in itself when vacuum packed, but not too much air that the cereal crushes easily due to hitting up against the side of the box and itself. We are planning to take most of the air out and put a little cushion on each side of the box to protect the cereal from crushing to make even less space for the cereal to move. We will do this all using biodegradable plastic and a zip close feature on the cereal bag. That is how we plan to tackle this problem.

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