Three 16-year-olds just did something a lot of well-funded labs haven’t managed to pull off. They won the Earth Prize 2026 — the world’s biggest environmental competition for teenagers — with an invention made almost entirely out of kitchen waste.
Meet Vivaan Chhawchharia, Ariana Agarwal, and Avyana Mehta. All three are students at Jayshree Periwal International School in Kolkata. And on May 29, 2026, in Geneva, they became the first Indian team to ever win the Earth Prize 2026 global title, beating out six other regional winners after nearly 23,000 people voted from around the world.
Their invention has a name that sounds almost too simple: Plas-Stick. It’s a powder made from discarded tamarind seeds that can pull microplastics out of drinking water — no electricity, no fancy filter, just a handheld magnet.
What Is Earth Prize 2026, Exactly?
If you haven’t heard of it before, Earth Prize 2026 is the fifth edition of a global competition run by The Earth Foundation, a Geneva-based nonprofit. Every year, teenage teams from every corner of the world submit ideas to fix real environmental problems.
Seven regional winners get picked — one each from North America, Africa, Asia, Central and South America, Oceania and Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Every regional team pockets $12,500 to build out their idea. Then the public votes, and one team walks away as the Global Winner.
Plas-Stick won Asia first, back in mid-May. Two weeks later, they won it all.
So How Does Plas-Stick Actually Work?
Here’s where it gets genuinely clever.
The idea for Plas-Stick came from a village visit, not a classroom. The three students were studying environmental science when they visited a rural community and noticed something unsettling: families were storing their drinking water in shared plastic containers, with zero filtration. Watching a child drink straight from one of those containers stuck with them.
That one moment became the spark for their whole project.
Globally, more than 2 billion people don’t have access to safely managed drinking water. A lot of them are stuck relying on stored water that’s quietly full of microplastics — tiny plastic fragments too small to see, but not too small to matter.
So the team went looking for a fix that didn’t need power, money, or infrastructure most rural households simply don’t have.
Their answer: tamarind seeds. The bits people throw away after cooking.
They processed the seeds into a fine, biodegradable powder engineered to bind to microplastic particles. Here’s the process in three steps:
- Mix the powder into contaminated water.
- Stir briefly — the powder grabs onto the invisible plastic particles and clumps them into a visible mass.
- Pull it out with a plain handheld magnet.
That’s the whole system. No electricity. No complicated filter cartridges. Just tamarind, water, and a magnet.
And according to the team, the collected plastic doesn’t just sit around as waste — it gets repurposed into small usable items, so it never re-enters the environment.
One important caveat worth mentioning: Plas-Stick tackles microplastics specifically, not every contaminant that can make water unsafe. It’s a targeted fix, not a full water-treatment replacement — which makes sense given it’s meant to work alongside, not instead of, basic hygiene practices like boiling water.
This Isn’t Just a School Project Anymore
What makes Plas-Stick stand out isn’t just the science — it’s that it’s already out in the real world doing something.
The team worked with outside experts, including Dr. Rajesh Khandelwal, and reportedly developed the project with support from IIT Guwahati. By the time they won the global title, Plas-Stick had already reached more than 8,000 students and teachers.
Talking to Mongabay-India after the win, the team explained why microplastics specifically grabbed their attention: they’re invisible, but the risk is real, and most people in rural India have no idea what’s actually in the water they’re drinking every day.
With their Earth Prize 2026 winnings, the plan now is to scale up through decentralized production hubs across rural India. Their goal? Go from 8,000 people reached to somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000 by the end of 2026.
That’s not a small jump.
What the Win Actually Comes With
Beyond the prize money, there’s a nice symbolic touch: Plas-Stick will receive a “100-year flag,” hand-sewn from recycled sailboat sails, that gets flown at their school and eventually passed down to a future winning team — a tradition among past Earth Prize champions.
The team’s reaction to winning said it all: being the first Indian team to take the Global Prize felt surreal, and they hoped it would push other young people to believe their own ideas could matter too.
Back home, the recognition snowballed fast. The trio has been featured by national broadcasters and invited to speak at events like the Times Network Sustainability Conclave 2026 in New Delhi.
What’s Next for the Plas-Stick Team
Winning something this big at 16 tends to shape how you think about your future — and it clearly has for all three of them.
- Avyana wants to keep working in environmental science and policy, with a focus on communities usually left out of global sustainability conversations.
- Vivaan is aiming for economics, finance, and sustainability, hoping to eventually work where business meets environmental impact.
- Ariana is interested in green finance — she’s said the Plas-Stick journey taught her how good environmental ideas often stall out simply because they can’t get funded to scale.
The Bigger Picture
What’s genuinely refreshing about the Earth Prize 2026 story is how low-tech the winning solution actually is. No app. No AI model. No million-dollar lab. Just tamarind seeds that would’ve been thrown away, three curious teenagers, and a problem they actually saw with their own eyes in a village that doesn’t usually make headlines.
Plas-Stick won’t fix the global water crisis on its own. But it’s already reaching thousands of people, and the team behind it isn’t slowing down. For three teenagers from Kolkata, that’s a pretty solid start.
