Registration

1. To register you should be a student or recent graduate (within 3 years) from a degree-seeking program at Cascadia Region (WA, OR, ID, AK, and BC) high school, college, or university.

2. Teams must be student led. Eligible students can form a team with non-students, but for the sake of this competition, non-students will be considered as advisors. Advisors cannot present at the ZWH, nor can they receive any prize money.

3. Cross-disciplinary teams are highly encouraged. The most successful teams have members with various skill sets from various departments, including liberal arts, sciences, built environments, law, engineering, business, policy, etc. We encourage diversity in your team in every way possible.

4. The competition entry must be developed during the student’s tenure at their institution. Students working with outside entrepreneurs must create their own original business ideas and have responsibility for their own portion of the business. In this case students must have an ownership stake in the business or the potential for equity or employment.

5. If the team or company entering the competition is revenue positive, actual annual revenue cannot exceed $25k. (Please note this is different than the company’s projected revenue. This rule does not apply to projected revenue.)

6. All submissions to the ZWH must live up to the higher ideals of Zero Waste Washington. The team’s idea must be appropriate for a nonprofit-sponsored event. Zero Waste Washington reserves the right to disqualify any entry that in its judgment violates the letter or the spirit of the competition or exceeds the bounds of social convention.

1. Your submission into the competition is distributed to a large group of community professionals who act as coaches, mentors and judges. We therefore strongly encourage any team with concerns regarding intellectual property such as patent or copyright potential to either contact their University’s intellectual property office (for University-developed discoveries) or competent legal counsel (for non-University related ideas) before submitting their proposal in the competition.

2. Zero Waste Washington and the organizers of the competition are not responsible for any proprietary information and/or intellectual property included in a submitted business idea summary. If you think it is sensitive, don't disclose it!

3. Ultimately, protection of sensitive materials is the sole responsibility of the individual or team participating in the competition.

By attending Zero Waste Hackathon events online or in-person, participants grant Zero Waste Washington permission to the rights of their image, likeness, and recorded voice, without payment or consideration, for non-commercial use. Participants must understand that there is no time limit on the validity of this release, nor are there any geographic limitations on where these materials may be distributed. Students, presenters, coaches, mentors, and judges, and all other related parties to events may request photos or video clips for use following the event in question pending resource availability to service the request, and will be handled on a case-by-case basis. Attribution/Courtesy must be included with all photo/video use. Zero Waste Washington reserves the right to request the removal of hackathon photos/audio/video from third-party websites, distributed materials, and/or other media.