Hack the Waste 2026 – 24 Hours of Innovation, Collaboration and Sustainability

After 24 intense and inspiring hours, the online edition of Hack the Waste 2026 has officially come to an end — and what an incredible experience it was!

Over the past day, international student teams collaborated online to develop innovative solutions for sustainability and waste-related challenges. It was impressive to witness the creativity, dedication, teamwork and resilience shown by all participants throughout the hackathon.

These kinds of initiatives demonstrate the real value of international collaboration and challenge-based learning: students learning from each other, working across cultures and turning ideas into concrete solutions in a very short timeframe. 🌍💡

We had 

👉 7 teams
👉 43 students
👉 8 partner institutions
👉 7 different countries
👉 1 challenge from the city of Leuven,

competing each other, giving the best of themselves, working throughout the night. We are so proud of them and we think they are all winners 👏

The challenge that was provided: The City of Stad Leuven (Belgium) is responsible for keeping public space clean and responding quickly to issues such as litter and illegal dumping. This involves detecting problems in the streets, registering them in internal systems, assigning crews and equipment, and tracking completion and costs.
Thank you very much to Bart Houben and Thomas Van Oppens for providing us with the challenge

A huge congratulations also to all student teams for their creativity, hard work, teamwork and energy throughout the event. It was incredible to see students from different countries collaborate, develop innovative ideas and present solutions for sustainability and waste challenges in such a short time. 🌍💡

A special thank you as well to all coaches, jury members and colleagues who supported the event and helped make it a success.

And of course the jury had to appoint 1 winning team… 🏆👏

Team Recode , with James from Belgium Campus, Zeynep from İstanbul Beykent Üniversitesi, and Chiara and Zakaria from Hogeschool UCLL. They created a website to pinpoint the level of trash and location, which takes input via a WhatsApp bot. They have added gamification for the reporting of trash, to incentivizise students to use the bot. They have also added machine learning models to predict where trash/litter would likely happen, based on historical data and the influx of new data.
They truly impressed the jury with their idea, presentation and teamwork!
Time now for some well-deserved rest after an unforgettable edition of Hack the Waste! 😊