UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — When Penn State graduate student Divya Pant entered the Miss Nepal North America pageant, it wasn’t simply the crown she was after — it was the opportunity to promote her waste management organization, Carbon Away.

Pant, a doctoral candidate in the BioRenewable Systems graduate program in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, participated in the contest this summer to help raise awareness about the project, which she founded in 2021 with the goal of converting waste generated during the agricultural process into energy and fertilizer.

Pant hopes that as the project, which is based in Nepal, moves from planning to implementation, it will improve the environment as well as conditions for women working in agriculture, who are often the face of agriculture and yet remain underserved and underrepresented.

“In a sustainable system, agriculture and environment go hand-in-hand,” Pant said. “The system should uplift the economy, serve the community and support the people. The same community in return should do its part and be compassionate about the environment and the planet.”

Pant said her experience within the College of Agricultural Sciences was vital to getting Carbon Away off the ground. In 2021, she and her colleague Ram Neupane presented the project at the Ag Springboard Competition, an annual business pitch competition similar to Shark Tank that is open to all students at Penn State. The team placed second, nabbing a $2,500 prize.

To learn how to define the business niche and pitch a company with impact and gravity, Pant also attended a mentoring session at LaunchBox, where she learned how to enhance her networking skills, a quality that she argues is essential to growing her project. She said she also appreciated how the team helped her work on her leadership abilities.

She also noted the connections she made with faculty in the college.

“My advisers, Dr. Sjoerd Duiker and Dr. Christine Costello, and other professors at Penn State have greatly helped me widen my networking,” Pant said. “I was able to leverage my wider networking to benefit the project impact in Nepal while representing international agriculture development with Penn State.”

Pant said Carbon Away was born out of her experiences growing up in poverty in a Nepali village. She observed firsthand the struggle of women in agriculture and the lack of access to reliable sources of electricity and fuel common for many in Nepal. By 2014, this early experience had inspired her to begin considering ways to generate energy from waste and subsequently improve productivity.

This idea then evolved into a plan for using a biodigester to convert organic waste into fertilizer, which then can be sold back to the farmers at a subsidized price. In brief, a biodigester functions by treating organic waste under anaerobic conditions to yield a product that can be used as a fuel source or converted for another function such as fertilizer.

Eventually, with the support of local government and citizens, Pant said the plan is to collect 30 tons of organic waste each day from sources such as small, family farms and municipal operations to convert into fertilizer. Pant also has partnered with the more-commercial Waste to Energy project to further her project’s ability to expand and contribute to Nepal.

In the meantime, Pant is working diligently to promote Carbon Away and Waste to Energy to drive greater awareness and further collaboration. She said participating in the Miss Nepal North America pageant, in which she placed as the second runner-up, allowed her to bring greater awareness to the work that Carbon Away and Waste to Energy are trying to accomplish in Nepal.

“The pageant gave me the opportunity to express my ideas and make people hear what I am trying to do,” Pant said. “I will need a lot of funding in the future, a lot of collaboration, and more stakeholders’ involvement. I wanted different organizations to see that this company can bring value to women in agriculture and bring value to the country as a whole.”

To contact Pant about her work at Penn State and in Nepal, email her at divyapant027@gmail.com.