The North Dakota Soybean Council and North Dakota State University are pleased to announce the winners and runners-up from school-level NEXTILE: The Soy in Textiles Design Challenge.
In NEXTILE’s second year of its competition, design students from 21 colleges and universities were invited to leverage their creative and problem-solving skills to produce the next sustainable innovation in textile design. The catch? Students must create their products using one versatile ingredient — soybeans.
Each participating individual or team received a design kit including six sustainable, soy-based materials including: soy silk, soy cashmere, organic pigment, soy wax and other soy products. Project submissions leveraged three or more of these ingredients to produce new textile threads, dyes, paints, designs and more. Judges included representatives from the design and textile industries, and soybean farmers from around the country.
“Serving as a judge for this competition highlighted the incredible potential of soy products,” said Jennifer Meyer, North Dakota Soybean Council director from Wilton “The innovative solutions presented by each team demonstrated soy’s diverse applications and emphasized its versatility as a sustainable resource.”
The winners from each school receive a $500 scholarship and the runner-up receives a $250 scholarship. In addition, the winners from each school are invited to participate in the national-level competition.
The NDSU competition recognized the following teams:
- Winning Team: Hayden Pritchard, Emersyn Campbell, Madeline Kersten, Avi Rai, Alivia Winter, Gift Nweemuu, and Kiera Booth, for their innovative design of plant-embroidered blankets.
- Runner-Up Team: Megan Hill, Grace Helm, Brekka Blessum, Kaylee Kern, Alexis Swendsrud, Samantha Ferch, and Tacy Gullund, for their creative dyed tar-pattern handbag.
U.S. Soy has long been a critical ingredient for product innovation, going all the way back to Henry Ford, who used soy-based paints, textile materials, and plastics for automobile design. Soy is used in every industry. Farmers can find their products in the streets they drive on, the shoes they wear, and the biofuels for their vehicles. The possibilities are endless. There are more than 1,000 soy-based products currently on the market — from tires and firefighting foam to fabrics and turf. You name an industry, and U.S. Soy is almost always an essential component.
U.S. soybean farmers and industry partners consistently push the limits of innovation to discover and deliver solutions to the most significant challenges our world faces, such as food security and climate change. NEXTILE was created to put sustainable soy materials into the hands of the brightest young minds in design to create the next generation of eco-friendly and biobased textile solutions.
Learn more about NEXTILE, the participating schools and students, and the next round of soy-based sustainable innovation at ussoy.org/nextile.
Source: ND Soybean Council
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