LANSING – Student researchers from Michigan State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are among the five winners of an Environmental Protection Agency national contest for innovations in sustainability.

The EPA established the People, Prosperity and the Planet Student Design Competition to support teams of undergraduate and graduate students working to develop solutions to environmental and public health challenges.

The latest round of grants provides around $100,000 for each team that previously received up to $25,000 from the agency for promising projects.

Michigan State’s team is working to create more sustainable materials for disposable cups, takeout containers and other single-use items.

Today, many of those products are made with microplastics and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, known as “forever chemicals” due to their extremely slow breakdown in the environment.

The team is developing fiber-based and paper packaging that works as well as plastic without using harmful substances.

In phase one of the project, the team created a new polymer for coating paper. With the new funding, the team plans to reduce the thickness of that coating to bring down the cost.

MSU research scholar Syeda Hamdani said it’s rewarding to work on a project with the potential to make a real-world impact.

“The best feeling is that I’m going to actually help humans and come up with something that is sustainable,” she said.

Muhammad Rabnawaz, an associate professor of packaging who oversees the student team, said that the idea would have remained “an untested file on my laptop” were it not for EPA funding.

If this phase of the project is successful, the team plans to bring the technology to market, Rabnawaz said.

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, student researchers will use the EPA funds to continue developing a tool to help lower-income families quickly and easily test their water for lead.

Home lead tests cost around $35, said Haoran Wei, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering who heads the Wisconsin team.

That cost “is not huge, but if you want to measure it frequently, it adds up,” he said.

Wei’s team plans to create a more affordable test kit that he estimated will cost around $5.

When a user mixes a water sample with chemicals provided in the kit, the water’s color will change depending on the concentration of lead it contains. The goal is to use smartphone cameras to analyze the samples.

Among the other grant recipients are students at Ball State University in Indiana for a project focused on removing microplastics from wastewater.