Colab’s Grease Car Project Wins at MIT IDEAS Competition!

This year’s MIT IDEAS Competition had twenty-six teams competing for seven prizes, and with other teams presenting projects such as inexpensive glucose testing strips and mapping devices designed for Brazilian slums, the competition was tough.

Fortunately, our project was among the winners!  We plan to train catadores (waste pickers) in São Paulo, Brazil to convert their eleven diesel vehicles to run on filtered waste vegetable oil.

Currently, our team is developing training materials (three short videos and a heavily-illustrated manual), participating in a Green Grease Monkey conversion workshop in Dorchester, Massachusetts to help design our week-long training sessions in São Paulo slated for mid-August.  We are also working on raising the additional funds necessary to cover our entire budget.

Also, Grease Project team members will participate in the IDEAS winner retreat in where we will attend workshops that support project management, team dynamics, fundraising, and assessment.  We will leave the retreat with a formal work plan devised to successfully implement the Grease Project.