Illinois Enactus, a student group focused on social entrepreneurship, houses nine different internal projects at the UIUC campus. Two of these projects, Symmetry and CreAlgae, are early-stage biodesign projects focused on creating products from natural materials to serve students, designers, entrepreneurs, and community members in the Urbana-Champaign area. Symmetry is creating wood without cutting down trees for eco-conscious woodworkers in and out of the university, and CreAlgae is focused on creating petroleum-free, algae-based bioplastics for local businesses. S

ymmetry in particular started out with the mission of combating deforestation by bringing sustainable approaches to design work. In the woodworking practice, there are numerous concerns tied to the use of colorful exotic woods like mahogany and rosewood — the harvesting of which is a major driver of forest clearings in the tropics. Project Drawdown, a collaboration among several experts that ranks climate change mitigation solutions, rated the halting of tropical deforestation as #5 and food waste reduction as #3 out of a hundred solutions.