Drawing on their experience building SSE, the organization’s founders help young innovators assess scientific questions, customer needs, economics, and pilot strategies.
— Students for Sustainable Enterprise (SSE) is applying its experience building a community-serving organization to help young innovators develop environmental ideas into credible ventures. Its Reclaim Challenge drew 52 teams, and 10% proceeded to mentorship and incubation support. EcoTex won, while Nishka Shetty’s used-cooking-oil soap venture, ReLather, was named runner-up.
Turning Waste Into Useful Products
EcoTex, Relather, and RootCycle approach resource recovery through everyday materials. Winning venture EcoTex explores food-industry waste as a feedstock for fermentation-derived, biodegradable textile fiber, investigating a possible alternative to petroleum-based synthetic materials.
Nishka Shetty, runner-up of the Reclaim Challenge and founder of ReLather, a venture that turns used cooking oil into soap.
Runner-up Nishka Shetty’s Relather explores turning used cooking oil into soap, giving a material left over from cooking a second purpose. RootCycle turns discarded paper and plant fibers into seedling pots designed to hold young plants through early growth and be planted directly into soil, offering an alternative to plastic nursery containers.
Together, these ideas connect environmental ambition with the practical demands of making a useful product. Each raises questions about material consistency, performance, production costs, and customer needs.
Built on Founders’ Experience
Co-founders Shreyas Chatterjee and Roshan Saxena, Monta Vista High School seniors, grew SSE from a student-led project into one that supports local businesses with energy and water assessments, improvement planning, and funding navigation.
Through conversations with local business owners facing high utility bills, complicated funding programs, and operational challenges, they learned generic advice isn’t enough. Environmental ambition needs a practical process that considers operating conditions, budgets, technical limits, and implementation requirements.
Testing Scientific and Commercial Assumptions
SSE now applies those lessons to students who need guidance testing an idea beyond its initial promise. Through mentorship and incubation, young founders can break an ambitious concept into questions they can research, test, and improve.
The questions differ across ventures. EcoTex must investigate fiber strength, durability, and feedstock reliability. Relather needs a consistent collection and production process, with testing to assess quality and safety. RootCycle faces the balance between a pot strong enough for watering and handling and one that breaks down after planting.
Through customer discovery, SSE connects technical questions to market needs. Investigating potential users’ expectations for performance, supply reliability, pricing, and compatibility with existing processes helps students identify promising applications and determine what requires further testing.
SSE also helps students consider lifecycle analysis to evaluate their environmental assumptions. Examining the full lifecycle allows them to identify potential benefits, recognize trade-offs, and determine what evidence is still needed before making broader sustainability claims.
From One Innovator to Another
In its small-business work, SSE learned that practical climate action depends on more than a broad goal. It requires clear information, realistic assumptions, operational understanding, financial reasoning, and a path from analysis to implementation.
The same principles apply to young founders building climate ventures. SSE helps students think about what a meaningful pilot should accomplish and focus on the next question they must answer. The goal is to help them test an idea honestly, improve it through evidence, and understand what it would take to bring it into the real world.
About Students for Sustainable Enterprise (SSE)
Students for Sustainable Enterprise (SSE) is a student-led organization helping South Bay small businesses understand their energy and water use, evaluate improvements, identify relevant sustainability-based funding opportunities, and navigate the filing process.
Contact Info:
Name: Roshan Saxena, Shreyas Chatterjee
Email: Send Email
Organization: Students for Sustainable Enterprise (SSE)
Website: https://studentsforsustainableenterprise.org/
Release ID: 89208144
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