• Three teenagers in New York designed a cardboard, called Kiriboard, to replace plastic packaging.
• They got the idea when a box of motors for their robotics hobby arrived damaged.
• Their invention won the $12,500 Earth Prize. Now they plan to buy a machine to make more Kiriboards.

Three teenage boys in New York City have invented a clever packaging material that they hope will replace toxic plastics and make plastic-free shipping a reality.

Zhi Han (Anthony) Yao, Flint Mueller, and James Clare are planning to pursue a patent and eventually pitch their product to Home Depot, as well as traditional shippers like Amazon, FedEx, and the US Postal Service.

They call their geometric, cardboard invention Kiriboard, since it's inspired by Japanese kirigami, which is the art of cutting and folding paper.

"Something like this is the wave of the future," Jerry Citron, the teenagers' environmental-science teacher, told Business Insider.

Yao, Mueller, and Clare won the Earth Prize on April 8, making them one of seven winning environmental projects by teenagers across the globe. The award comes with $12,500, which they plan to use to buy a cutting machine, called a CNC router, and test more prototypes.

Plastic-free shipping could change the world

Just like any plastic, Styrofoam and other plastic packaging can shed microscopic bits of plastic into homes and the environment.

Microplastics have been detected from the oceans to the top of Mount Everest, in animals' and humans' body tissues and blood, and even in rain all over the planet. They're associated with heart attack and stroke risk. Some researchers suspect they could even be contributing to the recent rise in colon cancers in young people.

"I didn't realize it was as big of an issue as it was," Yao told BI. "I mean, companies have made sustainable initiatives and greener initiatives, but they haven't really fully replaced plastic packaging."

Enter the Kiriboard: Kiriboard is cut into lattice-like shapes so that it can bend to fill the space between an item and the wall of its box. The cuts give the cardboard a three-dimensional structure that makes it sturdy and allows it to bend and absorb impact, protecting what's inside, similar to bubble wrap but without the plastic.

Once perfected, the three teens hope their design can help ship packages of sensitive or heavy equipment even more securely, at a competitive price.

Broken motors and crumple zones

Clare, Mueller, and Yao are all on the same robotics team at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. Clare is a junior, and Mueller and Yao are seniors.

The idea for Kiriboard started when they opened a shipment of Kraken X60 motors, which are about $200 a pop. They found that the brass pins, which connect the motors to a robot, were damaged and unusable. They assumed the pins had been damaged in transit.

"We're like, well, we should do something about this packaging, because clearly the packaging wasn't good enough," Mueller said.

Clare thought about how cars are engineered with crumple zones, meant to absorb the energy of impacts to protect the people inside.

Similarly, he said, "you can make strategic weak points in your packaging so that the package warps and deforms," sparing the package's contents.

With help from the Earth Prize program and Citron, they built and tested their first Kiriboard prototypes.

The matrix

It was a scrappy effort, with cardboard scavenged from their school.

After some research and consulting various teachers, Yao said they drew up eight or nine different designs, and narrowed down to four to build and test. Then, came the fun part: dropping heavy stuff on their creations.

To test their prototypes' durability, the teens slammed them with a roll of tape, a stapler, a can of soda, and a metal water bottle — "which did the most damage, but not as much as we thought it would," Clare said.

They dropped each item onto the Kiriboard prototypes from various heights, so that they could calculate and study the physical forces of each impact.

"Basically, we want to see what's the most amount of force it can take before it snaps," Yao said.

The results were promising, the trio said. The Kiriboard prototypes sustained very little damage, which they judged by checking the cardboard for dents. They plan to move forward with all four designs, which they hope will be useful for different types of shipping.

In the design pictured above, four triangular "legs" hold the Kiriboard in place inside a box.

"This middle section, we call it the matrix. This is supposed to be flexible," Yao said. Once you place an item for shipping inside the box, the matrix "is supposed to form to the product."

Once they've purchased a CNC router to automate cutting the cardboard, they plan to test prototypes by actually shipping them in boxes.

"Right now, we want to perfect our product," Yao said.

When it's ready, they said they might also pitch it to the electronics company AndyMark, which shipped them the robotic motors that arrived broken.

"No shade to them," Clare said, adding that their robotics team frequently orders from AndyMark with no problems.

"We're on the brink of, like, this could become a reality, and it's just up to us to put in that final effort," Mueller said. Clare chimed in: "All from a broken package."

• Amara Nwuneli won a $12,500 Earth Prize for turning a dump into a playground in Nigeria.
• Nwuneli plans to use the award money to build three more parks.
• She hopes the green spaces can help clean up trash and combat extreme heat and flooding.

A teenager in Nigeria just won an international award for using recycled materials to transform a trash-dumping ground into a park with a playground, and she's not stopping there.

On Wednesday, 17-year-old Amara Nwuneli was awarded $12,500 in the 2025 Earth Prize competition, which casts a worldwide net for teenagers working on projects for environmental sustainability. The program provides mentorship and support for teens like Nwuneli to further develop their ideas.

Nwuneli said she plans to use the prize money to build three more parks.

"I'm excited for the future," she told Business Insider.

She wants to create more green spaces and shade in Lagos, a city of 17 million people where less than 3% of the land area is green, according to a 2023 analysis.

As cities get hotter across the planet, green space is critical. Trees and vegetation provide shade, which cools the ground, but they also help reflect sunlight away and release moisture. Unlike pavement, green spaces don't absorb much heat, but they do absorb rainwater and help reduce flooding.

Parks and greenery are also good for human health. Studies suggest they can help cut pollution exposure, improve mood, and even reduce mortality.

Turning a dump into a playground

Nwuneli became concerned about the climate crisis after floods overwhelmed her home in 2020, displacing her family. She said her parents' spice business was affected too, since the rains washed away crops.

As a self-described "theater kid," she wanted to get the story out, so she started recording and sharing videos about the floods. She says her efforts raised 2 million Nigerian Naira (roughly $5,000 in 2020 dollars) to help rebuild two local schools.

That was the beginning of the youth NGO she founded, called Preserve Our Roots. They produced a documentary about the climate crisis in Africa in 2023, which you can watch on Youtube.

She said the reaction to her documentary made her want to help Nigerians connect more with the environment.

"People came to us and was like, but I don't see it in my community. I don't see nature," Nwuneli said.

So the group decided to bring the nature home — starting with a small park that wouldn't require a lengthy government approval process.

At a site in Ikota, Nigeria, Nwuneli worked with local artisans to procure reclaimed metal and wood, as well as tires that were laying around the area, to build a slide, swings, and climbing wall.

The area, which Nwuneli described as a slum, is flood-prone. Indeed, many of the surrounding houses are built on stilts, she said. So, with the help of donations and volunteers, Nwuneli's NGO planted flood-resistant trees around the playground — among 300 trees she says they planted across the wider area.

They first homed in on this dump site in November. On March 1, they opened the park for schoolchildren.

"I remember when the children were like, 'now something we can actually call beautiful.' It kind of broke my heart," Nwuneli said.

In her eyes, though, this is just a pilot park.

A Central Park for Lagos

With the Earth Prize funding, Nwuneli is planning three more parks. They won't be playgrounds like the one that opened in March, she says, but multi-functional community hubs with gardens, greenhouses, and waste collection sites.

She's aiming to convert a large landfill in Lagos, pending government approval. For the other two parks, she's targeting the neighboring Nigerian states of Ogun and Oyo, which are also experiencing floods and droughts that will likely get worse as global temperatures rise.

"I'm not satisfied. I feel like every community needs this," Nwuneli said.

Her ultimate dream, she added, is to have a Central Park in Lagos.

The Earth Prize chooses winners for seven world regions. Nwuneli is the winner for Africa. A public vote opens on Saturday to select a global winner.