BOSTON – At just 13 years old, one local middle schooler is questioning whether she could help forests build back after environmental catastrophes – and having some success.
Kaia Minn, a student at the private Park School in Brookline, Massachusetts, said she came back from an animal rescue and conservation volunteering trip in 2025 inspired by ecosystems and wildlife work.
“Around the same time, I kept seeing news stories about the huge wildfires in California and Canada,” Minn said. “It made me wonder how forests recover after so much damage and whether there was a way to help more seeds survive and grow. That’s what eventually led me to start working on the biodegradable seed pods.”
Just about a year later, Minn completed months of development and experimentation using lemon peels and other plant-based materials to help seeds sprout, earning a 2025 Massachusetts State Merit Winner prize from the 3M Young Scientist Challenge, a spot from the National Academy of Inventors as a Genspiration Prize Finalist and presenting at a conference in Los Angeles.
The young researcher from Boston also filed a provisional patent for her design.
Minn said she learned that “many seeds and seedlings never survive long enough to become plants or trees” and narrowed in on lemon peels to see if there was a plant-based way to give them a better shot.
“People often think climate solutions have to be huge,” said Minn. “Sometimes they start with a very small idea that you can develop on your kitchen counter.”
The teenager said she’d heard a seed described as a “baby with it’s lunch packed.” Her experiment, she said, intended to give it “something more – a shelter, a shield, and a second life made from food waste.”
The biodegradable protective seed pod also aimed as avoiding plastic waste often found in traditional seed starting materials, allowing it to “potentially be deployed by hand or dispersed by drones in large-scale reforestation efforts, helping restore hard-to-reach areas after wildfires or other environmental damage,” according to Kaia’s mom Jana Minn.
Minn said she was surprised by how many failed experiments she went through before finding something that worked.
One of the key experiments found that her seeds protected by the lemon-peel pods showed a 94% improvement in early germination, while exhibiting no mold growth, compared to untreated seeds, according to Minn’s data.
Presenting at the National Academy of Inventors – which awards Genspiration Young Inventor Prize in the K-8 category with cash prizes and patent application support – was “exciting,” Minn said, noting she got to meet inventors, scientists, and researchers interested in helping improve the idea.
“My hope is that this technology could someday help with reforestation, sustainable agriculture, or other environmental challenges,” Minn said. “I’ve spent a lot of time testing it in my kitchen, but I’d love to work with a reforestation group and see how it performs in the wild.”