When Sidhant Pai visited a local rubbish dump in his home city of Pune,?India, he was struck by the size and intensity of the operation. Large black crows swooping overhead, roaming pigs, overwhelming odours and groups of waste pickers collecting plastic bottles in large white sacks.
There are an estimated?15 million people globally who currently make their living from waste picking and many earn less than a dollar a day. A key problem, says environmental engineer Pai, is that workers only capture a tiny proportion of the value of the waste they collect, separate and transport to scrap dealers.
Together with his parents, Suchismita and Jayant Pai, he founded social enterprise Protoprint in 2012, one of a number of organisations trying to address the twin issues of poor conditions for waste pickers and plastic waste pollution. More than?300m tonnes of plastic?are produced globally every year, with much ending up in the ocean (one?refuse truck’s worth every minute), in landfill, or on city streets.
“Our focus was on looking into different ways to add value to the waste, we were agnostic about the specific product,” Pai says. After experimenting with making a few different products, Protoprint settled on making the plastic filament – the “ink” – for 3D printers. “It added a tremendous amount of value to the waste plastic while still being relatively simple to manufacture at the dump.”
Protoprint partnered with SWaCH, a Pune-based cooperative wholly owned by waste pickers. Together they have set up a low-cost filament production facility at a local rubbish dump in Pune operated by SWaCH waste pickers to convert plastic waste – specifically high-density polyethylene (HPDE) mostly used for plastic bottles – into 3D printing filament to eventually be sold to Indian or international?3D printing?companies.
Protoprint buys filament from SwaCH for 300 rupees (£3.50) per kg – if waste pickers sold the plastic waste directly to scrap merchants the pickers would receive around 19 rupees (23p) per kg, says Pai. “After factoring in the costs of production and the various other expenses, there is still a six to eight times multiplier per kilogram of filament,” he says.
The market for filament, the majority of which is made from virgin plastic, is growing rapidly. A?report by a leading markets analyst predicted the 3D printing materials market would grow by nearly 266% over the next five years, to be worth £1.07bn by 2021.
However, most of it is expensive because of production and export costs, says William Hoyle, CEO of?TechforTrade. The British charity is working to promote and standardise an ethical way for filament to be made from the plastic collected by waste collectors.?
Ethical filament will be cheaper to buy than commercial filament, Hoyle says, because waste plastic is free resource and production costs are lower in developing countries.
To read full story, visit https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/nov/06/3d-printing-plastic-waste-poverty-development-protoprint-reflow-techfortrade.