Edgerley Family Dean of the College of Business Administration Ali Malekzadeh; co-owner of MeltPoint Environmental Brad Hall; founder of MeltPoint Environmental Chad May; and Kansas State University President Kirk Schulz with the check Hall and May received for winning top prize in the university’s Launch a Business program.

Submitted to Sumner Newscow — MeltPoint Environmental, a start-up business from Caldwell, Tuesday won $50,000 in cash and in-kind prizes in the final round of Kansas State University’s first Launch a Business program, according to an article in the Wichita Business Journal.

MeltPoint, a business of CMB Holdings LLC, was one of 10 businesses that received intensive, one-on-one mentorship through the College of Business Administration’s LAB program. The five-week program culminated Tuesday in a launch party at the KSU Alumni Association where each business owner set up a table to explain their startup or expansion plans to attendees.

Attendees then voted on their favorite business, and the top three vote-getters made a presentation to a board of judges, which selected the final winner. The top three were Meltpoint, NMotion UAS and Veriquik Consulting & Services.

Meltpoint will receive $5,000 in cash, along with professional website and social media design services and other prizes.

“This has been a great experience,” said Chad May, CEO of Meltpoint and developer of the proprietary machine on which the company’s business is based. May, along with Brad Hall, a managing member of CMB Holdings, said MeltPoint is in the fund-raising stage of launching the company and the prizes will help as they make their commercial launch.

The MeltPoint Surgical Bluewrap Recovery Machine was designed by May to reduce landfill waste and save money for hospitals, May explained to a group gathered around his table. Hospitals use a thick blue material, called surgical blue wrap, to cover instruments after they have been sterilized. Likening the material to wrapping paper, that comes nice and neat on a roll but manages to morph into bags of trash on Christmas morning, May said the wadded-up blue wrap take a tremendous amount of space in hospital compactors and eventually in landfills.

“It makes up 30 to 50 percent of OR (operating room) waste by volume,” he said, and hospital compactors only decrease that volume by two to one.

MeltPoint’s machine uses thermal densification – a process of heating plastics such as polypropylene – to reduce the size much further.

A prototype of the machine was put into a Wichita hospital for testing, and May said a final version is expected within three to four months.

Although they may not have won the big prize, the other nine participating business people received extensive business training over the five-week program.

Niklas Hinson, from Goddard, Kansas and a recent KSU graduate in mechanical engineering, participated in LAB as part of Impact Engineering, which he described as a “think tank that cranks out thoughtful products that have a positive impact on society.”

“We’re engineers,” he announced, as if that explained why he needed LAB. “We have almost zero business sense. It’s been absolutely fantastic to sit through this business accelerator and get intense, compact business lessons.”

Along with his work at Impact, which has developed a smart phone vehicle monitoring and improved driving safety device (it turns off texting when the user is in the car), Hinson also was part of developing a separate product for another LAB company, Radiation Detection Tech.

That product was chosen this week as one of R&D Magazine’s top 100 newly developed technologies. Click here to see a separate article about that award.

Over the next few weeks, BizManhattan will talk to the LAB businesses about the challenges involved in start-ups, what they took away from the LAB program and where they are in the process of launching their products.

The LAB program is a new offering from K-State’s business college and was run by Chad Jackson, director of the Center for the Advancement of Entrepreneurship. The businesses were selected from statewide applicants and received training, mentorship and help from business students during the program. It was sponsored by KS State Bank, GTM Sportswear, Rocking M Radio, NetStandard and CivicPlus.