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. Symmetry 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. By converting the sugar (or saccharides) in some of the most wasted food items like spoiled fruits and breads, the bacteria that Symmetry works with helps the project address both issues by producing the cellulose of its strong ‘alternative wood’. To date, the project has made several colors of the material and is receiving detailed and encouraging feedback from woodworkers in the Urbana-Champaign area who want to incorporate it into their work. The idea behind Symmetry was also acknowledged in the Technology Entrepreneur Center’s (TEC) Innovation Prize competition. In the meantime, CreAlgae has developed a base formula for their bioplastic and numerous prototypes for their product, created using both wild and processed algae. The future source of algae will primarily be local harmful algal blooms, and CreAlgae has been in frequent contact with local lakes and state parks to confirm the existence of blooms around the Champaign-Urbana area. Together, the two projects are leading an unprecedented effort to register UIUC in The Biodesign Challenge (BDC), an annual competition in which teams of artists and scientists from universities across the world learn how to develop sustainable products with biotechnology. Past participants have used bacteria to create efficient refrigeration systems that emit no greenhouse gases, mushrooms to create low-cost toilets for underprivileged communities, and invasive zebra mussels to create colorful soda-lime glass.