The Macau Biopetech eco-friendly cat litter team at the Cheng Yu Tung College of the University of Macau is composed of college students including Tan Pui Si, Tong Man, Fu Hao Ming, Wang Cheng Hao, the team consultants includes the College Master Professor Wong Seng Fat and the Resident Fellow Dr. Tang Yu Ming. The team aims to transform the waste Brewer’s Spent Grain (BSG) generated by the beer industry into eco-friendly, healthy, and high-quality cat litter products. Under the technical guidance of Professor Tam Kin Yip from the Faculty of Health Sciences, the team uses the sugar phagocytic technology to transfer the residual sugar from the BSG, to prevent the baby cats from ingesting sugar by mistake. On November 4th, 2021, the team successfully shortlisted from the 53 teams in the Hong Kong-Macau division of the “2021 Tenth ‘Win in Guangzhou’ and Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area University Student Entrepreneurship Competition”. On December 15th of the same year, the team won the third prize in the final of the competition out of 45 participating teams.
The idea of the project came from the first generation of college start-up team “2048 Brewery Macau: Funny Eye” of Cheng Yu Tung College. The “Funny Eye” was established in September 2018 and incubated at Cheng Yu Tung College. It officially set up a factory in Macau in January 2021 and officially started producing local craft beer in June 2021, creating a high-quality craft beer belonging to the Macanese. However, due to the lack of downstream industries for BSG recycling in Macau, many BSG produced by the brewery must be treated as kitchen waste, resulting in resource waste. Under this background, the project concept of eco-friendly cat litter was generated, combining malt residue and cat litter ingeniously.
Cheng Yu Tung College had provided support for the team academically. In the early stage of the project (March 2021), Cheng Yu Tung College formed a study group namely “the Science of Cats”. The event attracted more than 20 college students to participate. The participating college students were divided into four different groups: market research, industry pain point research, patent research, and institutional research according to their interests and professional abilities and they dedicated together to the preliminary research of the cat litter project. The study group conducted group presentation and discussions every week. After one semester, the study group facilitated a complete business plan. Only 4 college students were selected from the study group to form this start-up team. In addition, the group had successively achieved breakthroughs in the stages of raw material ratio experiment, product prototype testing, and small-scale production within one year.
The team adheres to the original intention of loving cats and cooperates with the Anima Macau (Society for protection of animal). The cat paradise of the Anima provides shelter for more than 300 abundant cats. The team went to the cat paradise as volunteers to help clean up cat excrement and then learnt the cat’s excretion preferences and habits, thereby providing sufficient knowledge and practical foundation for the product quality and function.
The team formally joined the incubator program of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center of the University of Macau in early November this year.
Thanks to Professor Jerome Yen, the Director of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center, for providing many valuable opinions on the project. In addition, the team is also very grateful to the Vice Chairman of the University of Macau Alumni Association, Mr. Danny Chau, and the former General Manager of Macau Beer, Mr. Daniel Hung, for providing rich and valuable suggestions for the competition of this project and injecting valuable enlightenment into the later development and planning of the project.
The team plans to provide free cat litter for the different abundant cat shelter in the future and plan to prepare cat litters that can detect the health status of pets through excrement, allowing owners to detect abnormal physical conditions of cats as soon as possible.
The Cheng Yu Tung College Startup team – BioPetech with College Master Prof. Wong Seng Fat and Resident Fellow Dr. Tang Yu Ming
The College Startup team – BioPetech wins a third prize at an entrepreneurship competition in the Greater Bay Area
The team members of the College Startup team – BioPetech were selected in a study group “the Science of Cats”.