Contact: Autumn Sabo, aesabo@wisc.edu; Matthew Hamilton (651) 734-8332, mjhamilton3@wisc.edu
Madison – Every startup should have an origin story. Apple and its essential garage. The Wright brothers: two bicycle mechanics who invented one incredible flying machine.
The genesis of the nontoxic Buckthorn Baggie starts with trees that refused to die. The common buckthorn, one of the most troublesome invasive trees in the Midwest, forms a dense thicket that crowds out native plants. Cut to the ground, it springs back, Hydra-like, with up to a dozen eager offshoots that form an equally appalling forest monoculture.
Herbicide kills buckthorn, as does uprooting. But many people disdain herbicide, and uprooting fails on trees above an inch or so in diameter.
Enter Buckthorn Baggies, an invention that University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering senior Matthew Hamilton cooked up as a high school student in Woodbury, Minnesota.
The problem was simple: Buckthorn kept resprouting after Hamilton cut it back in his backyard.
The solution was equally simple: a heavy, black plastic bag to cover the stump that was held in place by a cable tie. Within a few months, this patent-pending cure would annihilate the weed tree once and for all.
The Baggie deprives buckthorn of light, preventing those nasty resprouts with neither chemicals nor heavy lifting.
So, as Hamilton enrolled at UW-Madison and worked toward a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, he was also perfecting the Buckthorn Baggie and starting his business. “I’ve done this from the beginning to the end, and saw the entire process of getting the product ready to market,” he says. “You think you can just come up with something and put it on the web and sell it, but I realized there was a lot more to it than I expected.”
READ MORE AT http://news.wisc.edu/
