Plastic Beach Party

Recycling doesn’t work. The technology works but plastic isn’t getting recycled.  Most “recycling centers” only sort and resell, and no one is buying. Recycling is hard, dirty, and more expensive than making virgin plastic, but current practices don’t value or reflect this. They depend on massive scale and overproduction, and smaller communities that produce less waste can’t even participate.

In Aruba, we started a low cost replicable waste management program that collects plastic waste and manufactures recycled products locally, using digital fabrication tools and DIY machines. Focusing on tourism, one of the largest industries in the Caribbean, we charge what it costs for recycling by the kilo. This incentivizes a decrease in plastic waste and reduces our financial risk, covering recycling costs and allowing products to be priced competitively and fund expansion. Our hyper local model makes it easy for more entrepreneurs to start plastic recycling programs.

A reliance on imports and tourism results in large per capita plastic footprint on small islands. Aruba, with only 120,000 residents, but more than 1 million tourists per year, produces about 60,000 kg of plastic waste everyday. Caribbean plastic waste ends up in poorly managed, often coastal landfills. The impact of plastic eroding the beaches and marine life is deeply felt. But recycling is difficult. Even large rich countries, with legal frameworks around recycling, experience low rates of plastic recycling. Most Caribbean islands don’t have access to plastic recycling, a problem which was exacerbated recently when many recycling markets in Asia closed down.

Virgin plastic products are cheap, which makes it hard for recycled products to compete, with their higher processing costs and lower material quality and homogeneity. Many attempted solutions to plastic waste such as payments for plastic, waste to energy plants, and even biodegradable plastics, actually encourage more use. In the end, none of these efforts help us transition away from a fossil fuel intensive linear economy, and none of them ask the consumer, government and companies to take responsibility for the impact of their waste.

Our waste management focuses on the tourism industry. Hotels are the biggest businesses in Aruba, and we estimate that the 30 largest hotels discard as much plastic as 30,000 households. Changes in consumption at the tourist level have a way of spreading. To many, tourists represent an aspirational class and lifestyle. Visitors from areas with recycling programs often expect recycling at their hotel, and many hotel chains have corporate policies or accreditation standards that encourage it. We also calculate the carbon impact of recycling, something many hotels need.

We manufacture custom plastic-intensive products, designed to be durable, valued, and re-recyclable. With a range of open-source self-built manufacturing and digital fabrication tools we are able to serve a variety of customers, from individuals to commercial retailers. We offer our recycling clients an additional discount on recycled products, which encourages them to substitute imported products with local ones, reducing their waste and boosting their reputations. Using 3D printers and CNC cutting with plastic intensive products we want to decrease the cost of recycled plastic, and to facilitate small scale manufacturing.

We’ve developed a replicable business model for small scale plastic recycling from waste to product, suitable for smaller markets such as Caribbean islands, villages, or neighborhoods. On one end we offer waste management services that include collection, washing, sorting and shredding of plastic waste for 7 types of plastic: PET, HDPE, LDPE, PP, PS, PLA, and ABS. On the other end we offer custom design and manufacturing of recycled plastic products.

Waste management services are billed per kilogram of plastic recycled. By doing this, we incentivize our customers to waste less plastic as it will directly save them money. We focus on customer segments that are willing and able to pay for the service, including hotels that can use recycling to build their customer base and brand, and anyone else who values recycling. For households, we offer pricing options to fit any budget, with discounts for people who deliver or clean their own plastic, and lastly the option to pay with time.

Our manufacturing tools are based on open source machines from the Precious Plastic community for injection molding, extrusion, and pressing, combined with digital fabrication tools to CNC mill, laser cut, and 3D print with Gigabot X. These machines, which were almost all self-built, allow us to make a wide range of products that include outdoor furniture, insulation bricks, and keychains among others.

Products are designed with the intention to displace virgin plastic products, be re-recycled, and to be plastic intensive. Products are priced to cover their design and manufacture, eventual re-recycling, and a margin to grow. This results in a financially sustainable business, and a circular consumption model where materials are never discarded.

Recycling clients are given 50% discount on products, which both encourages recyclers to purchase local products instead of importing, and encourages customers purchasing products to also sign up for recycling services.

Our model offers a low startup cost around $5000, which can be crowdfunded, to cover machines for processing. By putting the price on recycling, the business is paid up front and can start making money as soon as collection begins. We imagine a plastic recycling business that is more akin to bakeries or carpenters than large industry. Such small, visible, local recycling ateliers in the community can start selling recycling to the market niches that see the value in it, and build from there.

What makes our solution innovative is the resilience built into our business model, responding to local demand and disconnecting from global markets. Plastic recycling technology has been around for a while, but has been implemented in a way that promotes overproduction of disposable plastic and undervalues the cost of recycling, to the extent that recycling services haven’t been able to keep up, even with government subsidies.

We offer recycling services at cost. This not only makes sure that we can afford to recycle, it incentivizes people to use less plastic. We focus first on early adopters that want to recycle and value it. In Aruba this is the tourism industry, which accounts for over 50% of our plastic waste.

Our local focus also allows us to recycle more types of plastic. At the same time that people are becoming more aware of the plastic problem, plastic exporters exclude entire streams of plastic, leaving them to be landfilled or incinerated. This problem also occurs with newly developed plastics such as PLA.  Not depending on exporting waste allows us to develop a manufacturing protocol based on the plastics we receive for recycling, rather than on what is being valued abroad.

Our third major innovation is in small-scale manufacturing, where we leverage open source machines and digital fabrication tools that include Gigabot X and Shapeoko XXL to process more plastic with versatility.

By starting small, using open source tools, and focusing first on a few enthusiastic clients and growing from there, this model opens the door for similar recycling shops to open in different neighborhoods, villages or islands providing waste management solutions that fit the local context.

We provide an opportunity for people to not only take responsibility for their waste with recycling services, but also to participate in the elimination of future waste by choosing local recycled products. With these two aspects combined, financial incentives encourage recyclers to reduce waste production. 

We’ve seen the success of both of these elements over the past two years, after facing the cost of recycling, one client consuming 1000 plastic cups per day decided to switch from disposable to reusable cups. The long term impact is a push to change habits towards using less plastic and switching to plastic free options. By giving recyclers a 50% discount, customers also order products from us. In the long term this allows businesses to see us as a fabrication option, with competitive advantages and savings in imports, taxes, packaging and transport, in terms of both dollars and carbon emissions. By designing products to be re-recycled and integrating the cost of recycling into the price, we ensure that small purchasing agreements have integrated circular economy principles.

We're currently serving about 5,000 people consistently, mostly in hotels, and aim to reach 15,000 people by the end of 2020 by adding more hotels as clients. Two of our current clients, Marriott and Divi Hotels, have additional local hotels under the same management, and have already expressed interest in expanding their participation. We're also looking to sign up Aruba Port Authority to get cruise ships on board and Aruba Airport Authority to recycle with the airport as well as airlines. If this is successful we would be able to recycle for about 1 million tourists annually as soon as they arrive on the island. 

We would love to replicate the program on other Caribbean islands that lack plastic recycling, but it can also work in remote areas excluded from recycling programs or focusing on plastics excluded from local recycling systems. We would like to collaborate with actors already active on the ground to replicate the program. This allows us to build on each others strengths and gives recycling efforts more resilience in their respective markets. Within our team we also have members from Dominica and the Dominican Republic that would like to develop such programs in their home countries, and we’ve also been in contact with re:3D in Puerto Rico recyclers in Sint Maarten and Bonaire. If we’re able to start up a new program on a different island each year we estimate we could reach around 5 million people by the end of 5 years.

When we started there was no recycling in Aruba, and many larger countries were stopping recycling services, taking plastics to the landfill or incinerator. 

To be honest we think it’s a great success that we’ve had a growing sustaining business over the past 3 years, without government subsidies and charging around 7 dollars per kg to recycle plastic. When we started we met a lot of skepticism about paying for recycling at all, let alone at the rates we set. It’s working so well that we operate without a sales team, with clients seeking us out.

In the first year we recycled 1.5 tonnes, in the second 4.3 tonnes, and in the third we hope to reach 10 tonnes. We're also measuring the carbon impact of our business, and how many kilograms of plastic we process. So far we've avoided about 14 tonnes of carbon emissions through our recycling efforts. Lastly we’ve produced hundreds of products with the general slogan that we will try to make anything you ask us to.

We organize several national events like recycling during Carnaval and Easter camping season, each reaching more than 10,000 people. And we've created 10 jobs so far.

We have grown a social media following of more than 1000 people, and have been published in various tourist oriented media in Aruba. Aruba has been moving towards less plastic, passing a plastic bag ban in 2018 and now in 2020 a ban for disposable plastic food containers.

In 2020 we want to recycle 10 tonnes, reaching 17 tonnes of plastic recycled in total. We also aim to convert our factory to be fully solar. To process all this plastic we're working to develop a line of hotel beach furniture collaborating with Windesheim University students in the design process.

We've been working with re:3D and others in the Trash Printers United group to develop a replicable 3D printer that can print out of shredded plastic. We currently have a working prototype and hope to have it fully developed and shared by the end of 2020.

In five years we hope to be recycling at least 10% of all plastic waste produced on Aruba, and to help set up recycling facilities on 5 other islands to reach at least 1 million people consistently.  We’re currently in contact with groups in Puerto Rico working on this issue and are also looking at possibilities in Sint Maarten, Dominica, and the Dominican Republic. 

We would also like to expand on the development of interventions that can avoid plastic waste in the first place, such as plastic-free swimwear and water dispensing stations.

There is still a lot of resistance towards paying for recycling and a desire for easy solutions that generally involve downcycling, things like plastic roads, processing plastic into some type of oil, or incineration. There are different actors on the island starting to invest in some of these solutions.

The national waste management industry is facing mass discontent with the fires at the dump site, and are talking about building an incinerator. They are also currently collecting plastic waste under the label of "upcycling" but with no capacity to repurpose or recycle the material, instead simply storing it in a warehouse. These PR-centered efforts confuse a lot of people and lead to a general distrust in recycling options, threatening our credibility.

The many online articles claiming that recycling doesn't work, referring to the traditional practice of sorting and exporting, also create cultural backlash in a community that has never had recycling to start with. Additionally, the practices around the world with payments for plastic and subsidized recycling programs create an unrealistic expectation among people that they should be paid for plastic waste, obscuring the reality of the economics of recycling.

We focus on selling recycling in the tourism industry, which value recycling for their customers and are expected to recycle for their franchise agreements, and we hope that this trend continues in the future. From talking to hotel managers, we have understood that if the tourists ask for it they will do it. To boost this, we’re planning a social media campaign to interview tourists at beaches and encourage them to post on social media that they support their hotels to start recycling.

Additionally, we are working on tapping into hotel certification programs such as ISO and Green Globe, as well as hotel chains in the area with corporate policies for environmental responsibility, to notify them of the availability of plastic recycling and to encourage them to take advantage of our services.

To combat public misinformation we try to build trust in our program by being transparent, and sharing information honestly. This is easier for business to business communications, where they often want the receipts and proof of their investment, but is more difficult for households.

We also have a lot of foreign visitors and are trying to use this to publish articles that show how recycling is working here. We think that if we can get positive foreign press to back us up it will also increase local trust, and get more people including other islands to try it out.

Our operation is based in Aruba, and includes waste collection, cleaning, sorting, shredding, product design and manufacturing. Additionally, the majority of our machines have been built using local materials using open source designs from Precious Plastic and re:3D as inspiration.

We have also had the luck to collaborate and visit and share with partners in Latin America in Colombia (C-INNOVA and Eco-Pazifico), Puerto Rico (re:3D and Pablo Varona), Curaçao (Limpi), Brazil (ColaborAmerica and Plastico Precioso), Ecuador (Premios Latino Americas Verde).

Our full-time staff includes: Christie Mettes, project coordinator, grant writer, customer services, team manager, and product maker; Tony Sevold, research coordinator, repair and maintainer, machine developer, product designer, and product maker; Janine Tromp, product developer and plastic shredder; and Miriam Helder, plastic washer, sorter, and manager.

Our part-time staff includes: Marlene Sam, plastic washer and sorter; Drinnon Nyerere, plastic shredder; Mellaney Rodriguez, administrator and lawyer; and Germille Geerman, plastic collector.

We currently have two interns, one designing a 3D printable recycled windmill, and another developing the 3D printer to print with shredded plastic.

Our team is a diverse group of people from different backgrounds and nationalities, brought together by our willingness to try things out, to learn, experiment and work to make things better.  It includes a variety of perspectives including academic and professional experience in environmental science, mathematics, physics, microbiology, international law, computer science, videography, electronics, pedagogy, graphic design and structural engineering. What each of us does day to day doesn’t always align with our formal education, but having such a diverse team allows us to easily iterate and innovate, and combine our knowledge.

We started with setting up a makerspace where digital fabrication machines were made from e-waste, then crowdfunded and built plastic recycling machines from scratch as an open group, collaborating with the technical school to access metal working tools, the monument foundation to access a truck, chemical companies to get empty bins, and keeping a community based approach. In the same way we partner with international organizations like Metabolic in the Netherlands to inform our circular model, re:3D to help with 3d printing out of shredded plastic, and the global Precious Plastic community to support machine development.

We set out to build not just a technical solution but a business model that would work and pay for itself, and we’ve been able to grow with this format without any debt. Running costs are covered by the cost of recycling, and we’re using grant funding to expand and research.

We are part of the Precious Plastic community, using and sharing open source machine designs and experiences working with plastics. We have an ongoing relationship with re:3D to share resources and experiences towards replicable 3D printing directly from shredded plastic. With Limpi Curaçao we share product ideas and manufacturing techniques as small-scale recyclers. And with Metabolic we have a partnership to support us with web development and networking in the Netherlands and EU.

Key Resources 

• Space 

• Staff 

• Recycling machines

Partners + Key Stakeholders 

• Hotels and tourism industry 

• Potentially the government

Key activities 

• Plastic collection 

• Plastic sorting 

• Plastic cleaning 

• Plastic shredding 

• Plastic storing 

• Product design 

• Fabrication of new products from plastic waste 

Type of intervention 

• Waste management service 

• Recycled plastic products

• Information on how to reduce plastic use 

Channels (how are we reaching our customers and clients) 

• Direct calls and emails 

• Social media 

• Interviews with regular media

Segments 

• Beneficiary: Everyone benefits from less plastic entering the ocean, but we focus primarily on Arubans benefitting from a cleaner environment.

• Customers: We focus on tourists in our sales effort but the service is open to anyone.

Value Proposition 

• User Value Proposition 

  • Cleaner environment

  • Local custom recycled products

• Impact Measures

  • Kg of plastic collected / kept out of the environment 

  • Kg of carbon dioxide avoided by recycling 

  • Number of products made  

• Customer value proposition 

  • Responsible management of plastic waste 

  • Quantification of this in carbon emission reduction

  • Appeal to environmentally conscious tourists

Cost structure 

• Labor                 62.5 %
  

• Rent                 30%

• Electricity             3.75%

• Water                 1.25%

• Vehicle operation        1.25%

• Machine maintenance     1.25%

Surplus 

• Solar energy 

• More efficient machines 

• Electric vehicle conversion

Revenue 

• Waste management service 30%  

• Recycled product sales 29% 

• Recycling during events 18%

• Donations and grants 23%

Our recycling services are priced to cover the cost of recycling:

• $5.56 per kg for dirty plastic

• $2.78 per kg for clean plastic 

• 1 hour of volunteer work per kg of plastic 

This covers the cost of pick-up, sorting, washing and shredding. 

Recycled stock materials are priced as follows:

• $5.56 per PET sheet (40 x 25 cm)

• $27.78 per HDPE or PS sheet (100 x 60 cm) 

• $5.56 per pressed LDPE brick (60 x 30 x 15 cm)

• $11.12 per PP beam (5 x 5 x 100 cm)

Most of these are sold as parts of custom products that we design and make. For custom work we charge $27.78 per hour of design, preparatory, or manufacturing labor, and $12.57 per hour of machine work.

The manufacturing prices are 200% of what it costs, which is where we get surplus that allows us to expand and invest in expanding capacity. For recyclers, we discount this by 50% to sell them products at cost.

With these core activities sustaining themselves, we have additional revenue from occasional event campaigns and installations with sponsors that usually result in about $15,000 revenue per year, and we apply for grants and funds to be able to invest into research and development, averaging about $20.000 per year.

With the $30,000 prize, Plastic Beach Party would focus on doing two things: making investments that would allow us to decrease running costs and further develop our operation in Aruba, and collaborating with partner organizations on other Caribbean islands to replicate our approach to recycling in their community.

Investments total $13,500 as follows:

$2,800 for a second hand plastic granulator

$5,000 for a 5kW solar power system equipment, to couple with donated installation

$2,500 for a semi industrial Precious Plastic extruder

$3,200 for a Gigabot X extruder to 3D print with shredded plastic

Island collaboration efforts total $16,500 as follows:

$6,000 to find a partner to collaborate to start recycling on another island

$500 for a round trip ticket to another island to help a local team set up

$5,000 for a granulator, sheet press, and CNC cutter for the second facility

$5,000 for equipment for a third facility, complemented with other funding

With a smaller prize, each component will be scaled back with the minimum version consisting of an exploration and startup equipment for the second facility. With pilot funding, we would scale up replication efforts and put additional funding towards research and development of replicable tools.

Just making it to the finalist selection and pitch would give us the opportunity to meet the IDB team and a variety of other awesome plastic initiatives that we would be grateful for, even if we don’t win a pr

We would like to develop better replicable technology to sort and wash plastic, and to automate production. We would also like to learn more about processing ocean plastic from the beach, something we currently avoid. We’re looking at points in the process where we can make efficiency gains at a relatively low cost. Part of that is using digital fabrication tools, like re:3D’s Gigabot X to print directly out of shredded plastics. To reach these goals it would be valuable to share knowhow with other recyclers and work with universities that have material science expertise, design departments, to explore engineering opportunities, design challenges, and even bioprocessing options for certain plastics.  

Such organizations include:

Precious Plastic for machine development, networking, and replication

re:3D for 3D printing from trash

MBA Polymers or similar for plastic sorting technology

MIT and Michigan Tech University for replicable technology and material science

Van Plestik or similar for robotic arm 3D printing

Caribbean recycling projects and makerspaces for potential replication on other islands