[06]competition

★ Pitch, not code

WasteWise: Pitch the Future

Participant

A pitch competition, not a build: act as startup founders and convince the judges your idea gets us closer to zero waste. Bhavishya and I pitched EcoGrid, an upcycled edge-compute micro-cloud that turns discarded phones and laptops into a liquid-cooled cluster for Edge AI. Two crises, one idea: the e-waste graveyard and the power drain of cloud data centers. 🌍

When
March 2026
Where
Chitkara University, Punjab
Hosted by
Chitkara University Toastmasters Club · Chitkara University Language Centre
Format
in person · 4–5 minute pitch
Track
E-waste & data-center waste
The team at WasteWise: Pitch the Future

[01]The squad

  • Govind Jindal← that's me
  • Bhavishya Grover

My role · Co-founder, on stage (both of us pitched)

[02]The rounds

  1. Round 1

    The brief

    Teams of two, playing startup founders. Pick one waste category and pitch a technology-driven fix: the problem, the solution, the impact and a call to action. We chose two: e-waste and data-center waste.

  2. Round 2

    The pitch

    Four to five minutes, in English, both of us speaking, and no reading from paper. The rule that stuck: focus on convincing the audience, not just explaining the technology.

[03]What we built

EcoGrid

EcoGrid home page

  • Salvaged motherboards

    Functional boards bought from local e-waste shops, from phones and laptops thrown out over a dead battery or a cracked screen, networked into a local micro-cloud.

  • A bare-metal orchestrator

    Instead of heavy operating systems, a tiny orchestrator written in C pools the CPU and RAM of a messy mix of ARM and x86 chips, routing each task through lightweight containers like WebAssembly.

  • Two-phase immersion cooling

    Nodes stripped of their casing and submerged in dielectric fluid (mineral oil for a prototype): zero fan noise and near-zero cooling power.

  • Zero-trust memory

    Salvaged drives can't be trusted, so every client process runs only in RAM and is flushed the moment it finishes. Nothing touches the disk.

  • Built for Edge AI

    Not for training giant Transformers. EcoGrid targets MIT's Closed-form Continuous-time (CfC) networks, light enough to run on old smartphone chips.

  • Triple redundancy

    E-waste fails more often, so each task runs on three nodes at once. The first to finish wins and the others are killed. A dead board doesn't even register.

Gamma (deck)C orchestrator (proposed)WebAssemblyCfC neural networksTwo-phase immersion cooling

[04]From the floor

The dual crisis
The dual crisis
A supercomputer in every university basement
A supercomputer in every university basement
The EcoGrid solution
The EcoGrid solution
The orchestrator, in C
The orchestrator, in C

[05]The certificate

Certificate for WasteWise: Pitch the FutureDelivered ✓

Certificate found. 📬

A certificate of appreciation for participating in Pitch The Future, organised by the Chitkara University Toastmasters Club. Signed by Dr. Sovia R J Singh, Dean, Chitkara University Language Centre. 📜

“Most of my competitions end with code. This one ended with a five-minute argument, and that turned out to be its own skill: the best idea in the room still has to convince the room.”

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