Waste Plastics: Sorted, Separated & Recycled Products Center

The globally destructive issue of waste plastics is dramatically worse in Haiti with thousands of tons of plastic being dumped in the oceans or piled and burned. Our turn-key solution, once implemented in Haiti, can be successfully expanded and up-scaled throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. All current recycling projects in Haiti focus on collection, baling and international sales, but every container full of plastics that leave Haiti take 2 full-time jobs from Haiti to the location where the plastics are formed into new products. FdS is already the largest volume recycled products producer in Haiti with our paper-cardboard-sawdust fuel briquettes. Now, by implementing the complete tested solutions offered by PreciousPlastic.com into Haiti for the first time, FdS can expand into producing plastic products from available plastic products as well as producing complete turn-key SME shipping-container recycled products production centers for implementation throughout Haiti and for shipping throughout the region.

Environmental & Health - The globally destructive issue of waste plastics is dramatically worse in Haiti with thousands of tons of plastic dumped in the oceans or piled and burned. There are no modern landfills in Haiti. All current recycling projects focus on collection, baling and export.

Currently, mixed plastic, medical, toilet and food waste are dumped where pigs and humans forage for something to eat or sell, while breathing lung-choking smoke from smoldering fires, burning to make room for more dumped mixed-waste. Conditions are just as bad in non-permitted dumpsites on undeveloped land or just on the side of the roads.  Eventually, unprocessed waste makes its way to the ocean.

Economic - The economic returns of plastic recycling is currently dependent on international demand. When petroleum prices were higher in 2013, there was clear value for recycled containers, especially PET and HDPE, but when oil prices started falling, prices for recyclable materials dropped, and the economic benefits of recycling were removed. Additionally, every container full of plastics that leaves Haiti takes 2 full-time jobs from Haiti to the location where the plastics are formed into new products, compounding the country’s 70% rate of underemployment.

The new population who will be served from the FdS expansion are the underemployed, municipal government, and impoverished /underserved people of Montrouis, Haiti. Montrouis does not currently have any plastic collection or recycling service.

Most international development efforts for countries like Haiti are focused on immediate actions and do not focus on the long-term sustainable employment development that is most crucially needed.

FdS Haiti has a proven track record of turning recycled products into long-term sustainable job-creating solutions for Haiti. Work in the recycled plastics product sector would be a compatible expansion to the current operations of FdS Haiti. The mayor of Montrouis has contacted FdS to provide waste collection and recycling services to their municipality. An additional three large resorts are in the Montrouis municipality. With the resorts as paying customers, FdS will be able to offer discounted services to the people of Montrouis. This model will then be available for replication in municipalities throughout Haiti; several others are interested too.

[*Please note that the video we are submitting mentions plastics but does not go into the details of this expansion proposal. We are including it under deadline pressure to share the spirit and current operations of FdS Haiti.*]

Our solution is a facility for processing recycled plastics into consumer products. Port-au-Prince has several plastic collection companies who send baled plastics overseas. Currently, FdS collects thousands of pounds of plastic every month, which are sorted, separated, washed and sold to larger plastic-recycling collectors in Haiti. The plastics are then shipped off-shore for recycling.

We will establish this recycled products center as part of our anticipated expansion of operations to Montrouis, a community north of our current location in Port-au-Prince that does not currently have any plastic collection or recycling service. The mayor has requested that FdS collect and process all forms of waste for the municipality, which is home to three of the country’s largest resorts, with three additional large resorts nearby as well.

FdS already has the equipment available to process the community's paper, cardboard and sawdust into recycled fuel briquettes. FdS also has the logistics and experience to implement the required sorting and separation. However, the one sector that is crucial for the success of our new Montrouis location is a complete plastic cleaning, shredding, melting, extruding and molding production line. The FdS team has the fabrication experience to implement this system, and the complete technology is available open-source from the innovation team at Precious Plastic.

The FdS solution would start by recycling all HDPE and PP that our waste-collection clients provide. Since PET is more difficult to recycle, initially, it would be baled at our facility for exportation. But the HDPE and PP would be recycled into long-term use products that are in great need in Haiti, including school chair-and-desk combinations, shelves, and closet organizers. There is also a huge potential in the growing market for toilet seats; domestic production would allow FdS to customize the sizes of the seats to meet the specific needs of local customers.

Every aspect of the FdS implementation is co-created by our Haitian / International team working for the verifiable benefit of the Haitian people.

FdS developed and follows the "Listen. Lead. Listen Again." developmental method. First, we ask people what they want/need to make their lives better, listening closely to their answers. Next, the FdS team suggests and introduces innovations, technologies, operations, services and solutions that local people would not have access to without our participation. Then, we listen again to learn which of the innovations we suggest are most likely to be culturally adoptable, and we then create a design-feedback-loop based on those answers. Then, we repeat the process. 

We are not a top-down process or a bottom-up process. Rather, the FdS: Listen. Lead. Listen Again. model is an integrated co-created solution. Internationals work with local innovators to co-design, co-manage, co-own, cooperate, and introduce the most culturally and technologically effective solutions possible for issues that were previously considered intractable.

The mayor and the community of Montrouis are inviting us to move our primary operations there in order to expand and facilitate their current grass-roots recycling project while simultaneously expanding our operations from collecting, sorting, and separating all waste (with paper being recycled on our current site) to meet their needs of additional jobs and plastic specifically being recycled at the new site.

In the US companies succeed by doing one thing and doing it well. In Haiti, success lies in long-term commitment and being as self-sufficient as possible.

The FdS Theory of Change is based on "The Plunge" Change Mechanism, described below.

1. Secure the resorts as our main paying clients, and our meetings with them in 2019 confirms their interest.

2. Work with the Mayor of Montrouis who can assist us with permitting and provide us the land for our facility, thus their skin is in the game.

3. Establish the complete sorting, separation and plastic processing center with the new plastics recycled products factory as a compatible project addition (and job creating addition) to our current sorting, separating, paper processing technology

4. Produce and sell plastic products including shelving, closets, toilet seats, and school desks.

5. Generate specific data on the amount of each type of plastic / waste products that our clients produce. Determine the amounts available on a sustainable basis for waste-to-energy technology.

6. Expand to reach the point of being able to make the plastic-working machines as well as the plastic products.

7. Pay our workers to make these products.

8. Demonstrate and promote the systems through media, government presentations, youth centers and schools.

9. Establish satellite locations throughout Haiti and Dominican Republic.

10. Once business innovations are proven successful and (most importantly) financially profitable in Haiti, they are quickly copied by others in the society. Once we show that HDPE and PP can be easily recycled in Haiti with small machines, our process will be adopted by others in other communities, creating their own SMEs. Ideas are shared through successful implementations.

To accurately address impact numbers, the addition to FdS operations of plastic processing should be seen as an expansion of the model that we have been demonstrating in Haiti since 2012 and in the Dominican Republic since 2006. We currently have 12 full time employees, and 31 part time employees, and over 800 briquette stoves burning hundreds of thousands of FdS briquettes have been implemented in over 80 schools, orphanages and factories throughout the P-a-P region. We collect tons of plastic every month and with no options for domestic recycling of that plastic, our only option is to sell the plastic we collect to the larger plastic companies who mostly send it offshore for processing. The $30,000 prize would be exactly the amount needed to establish our first small-scale plastic processing center within a shipping container at the new Montrouis site. These units are all available now for import from preciousplastic.com, following the Precious Plastics Generation Four implementation model. This plastic processor will form our anchor for the development of our new center in Montrouis, which is 60 minutes drive north of our current P-a-P location. In the new location, our impact will dramatically increase since the mayor there has agreed to require the resorts to utilize our services under our pending public-private-partnership to provide Montrouis with municipal waste collection / processing services. Thus we will serve as many as 2000 additional beneficiaries in one year and potentially 20,000+ within 5 years, when we expand for the full Montrouis region.

FdS is the longest operating Social Enterprise on the island of Hispaniola with its original project's founding in 2005. FdS is a full Triple-Bottom-Line company with co-emphasis on the social benefit, ecological development and financial sustainability. 

Regarding financial sustainability, FdS has 501(c)(3) IRS non-profit status through our fiscal sponsor; however, we earn the majority of our income and operating expenses through our program-based actions in Haiti. The financial sustainability process that we have established over the past 15 years will be continued and expanded as we move into the new operation site in Montrouis. We offer the most ecological waste sorting and separating in Haiti, and we have since we started operations in 2012. Clients would pay to have their waste dumped-and-burned, so ecologically-minded businesses, organizations and agencies pay us more than our competitors charge to have the maximum amount of their waste recycled. Additionally, clients pay for their sensitive papers to be ecologically destroyed, and our briquette and stove buyers pay for the ecological products that they buy from us.

Our previous  eco-impact can be measured in tons of paper processed, which is over 130 tons, and in trees that did not need to be cut down in order to cook the over 900,000 meals that have been cooked on our briquettes. As for plastics, in the past three years, we have collected over 40 tons of materials which we have sorted, separated by variety and color, washed and transferred to our partners for recycling internationally.

Social Impact follows.

The ecological, social and economic impact value of the project will build throughout the implementation. For example, in addition to the recycled products produced, FdS will grow into the facility's production capacity to produce all of the plastic processing equipment required to implement a turn to build additional SME turn-key container units for our own expansion and implementation in other Haiti locations plus international export. Starting a recycled plastics SME manufacturing plant should be in the same price range as opening your own welding shop.

The Social Impact of our plan will be huge. 2019 in Haiti saw tremendous unrest. Schools and businesses were closed September -January. Sadly, the people of Haiti have very little to come out to support. Corruption, poverty, unemployment, filth, smog, everything seems to be going wrong. Our integrated solution is worthy of positive optimistic support: The Mayor of Montrouis contacted us because there is a grass-roots team in Montrouis who has started collecting garbage to clean up their town. In meetings, the resorts have asked us to provide services because they are now forced to dump their own waste. Hundreds of people from the community have come forward to share that they are ready to make the changes in their lives that would support Montrouis becoming an exemplary Ecological Development Zone community for Haiti and the entire Caribbean. In the spirit of the Haitian tradition of "Konbit," the schools, churches, businesses, organizations, resorts, and the government want to participate for the greater good of all.

The only options available for small-enterprise entrepreneurs in the waste field in Haiti are collection jobs where they earn income from selling what they collect, or being paid to take waste from households /businesses, or a combination of the two. Recycled products could be produced profitably in relatively small-scale facilities, with similar investment required as existing Haitian welding or aluminum pot-molding facilities. However, no-one in Haiti is producing the equipment that is internationally available through open-source from groups such as PreciousPlastics.com. Currently, the scale of equipment required necessitates US$100,000+ just to get started, and that is only for the large-scale cleaning, shredding and baling equipment. Currently, no turn-key solutions are available to allow entrepreneurs to collect waste plastics and turn it into sellable products.

Precious Plastics has complete diagrams and forums of diagrams, technologies and logistics, but no one in Haiti is producing these small-scale factory units nor the individual machines that Precious Plastics offers.

Cultural Change-Resistance, a.k.a., Status Quo Bias, is also a strong societal element in Haiti. The current culture sees many plastic products as disposable-anywhere. So streets and canals are piled with plastic soda bottles and food containers that currently have no more productive path to follow. Since there is no financial incentives nor convenient ecological options for waste disposal, ocean-outflow or piling-and-burning are the current societal norms. In Haiti, as in all societies, change will always be more difficult than many people anticipate it will be. Change is hard. But, change is possible.

One crucial difference in this FdS implementation is the long-term nature of the plan. Where many projects fail because the implementation organizations focus only on a 1 -3 year implementation window, this project is following the latest MacFound developmental research, which supports our existing FdS implantation model of planning and projecting with a 15 -20+ year commitment and implementation plan.

The Nobel-Prize winning discipline of Behavioral Economics has been a core component of all of the FdS implementations. The Ads principals learned of B.E. in 2015, but the concepts that we based the project on from the beginning: "Listen. Lead. Listen again." is extremely compatible with the basic B.E. concepts of operating through evidence-based programming rather that following established heuristics. 

Our theories of change are based on one of the mechanisms of change that we have identified and developed. It goes beyond the Nudge concept made famous by Thaler and Sunstein to the concept of The Plunge: immersion in a new concept can have the effect of enticing and encouraging the earliest early adopters of the FdS technologies. In this case, since the entire community of Montrouis will be engaged to make the transition to the FdS systemic solution (detailed below), the likely hood that positive feedback loops will be able to overcome status quo bias. By involving the whole community, communicating with them from the start, having frequent open-forum community input meetings, the entire community can learn the advantages and the positives that the program is bringing to Montrouis.

The fact is that both selections apply. The expansion that we are doing is in context of our existing 15 years of operation on the island of Hispaniola where we have offset over 13,000 trees and cooked over 900,000 meals, mostly for children just since we started in Haiti in 2012.

We have also included the link to the video below from our open-source technology resource: PreciousPlastics.com. FdS Haiti will become the first major Haitian implementor of the Precious Plastics system. FdS has been aware and active in the Precious Plastics network for the past two Precious Plastics generations. Now, as Precious Plastics has reached the plastic products production capacity that will be in sustainable, it is the perfect time to implement this open-source solution for the benefit for the Haitian people, starting with Montrouis. In fact, the concept that FdS has competitively chosen the community of Montrouis, over other interested municipalities, will be more incentive for the community to focus on the entire implementation's success. Thus, The Plunge change mechanism, by bringing the entire community in together can benefit from a virtuous cycle of input and development. The same path was followed in the development of all 8 generations of the FdS ecological stoves. Each generation was improved through implementing the suggestions from the Haitian cooks who utilized the stove everyday. The more invested the beneficiaries are collectively, the easier it is for the new technologies to be adopted. It is time to move the process forward in plastics.

Our plan for Montrouis is a synergistic integrated solution that is as self-sufficient as possible. Imagine programming on a secluded island; that is what Haiti is. Our system will include income-based hotel/resort clients, recycling as much paper, cardboard, plastic, and aluminum on-site as possible. The plastic processing center following the Precious Plastics model will include: a generator, shredder, heating unit, plastic mold-form and plastic extruder. These same machines will eventually be produced by our basic machine shop, plus a glass pulverizer which is in  Pre-processing glass and non-recyclable mixed plastic for on-site or off-site utilization, hopefully in Haiti. We will generate data on the volume of each material that is produced. This would help us in the process of identifying the potential for a waste-to-energy system to process the remaining plastics and other non-recyclable waste. Expansion plans include utilizing an on-site generator that is preferably powered by waste-biomass from the region and/or by solar power that can be the energy source for our growing fleet of electric utility /collection vehicles. Our full vision for growth also includes a reforestation plan based on indigenous Haitian trees grown through agri-forestry on land that the mayor has identified. This complete plan would make the FdS facility in Montrouis one of the most self-sustainable waste processing and recycled-products factories in the world. It would be the ultimate turn-key system. Additionally, the program would be open to the public in and open-source model where educational institutions were also welcome to visit and implement further innovative wast solutions.

FdS Haiti has 501 (c)(3) IRS non-profit status through our fiscal sponsor: Omprakash.org. In Haiti we operate as a Social-Eco Enterprise and we have legal business status as Fuego del Sol Haiti SA / FdS Haiti SA. The Haitian company was officially founded January 2013, after over 12 months of research in Haiti and similar operations in the Dominican Republic since 2005.

We currently have 12 full-time an 31 part-time staff. With the expansion proposed here those staff will be joined with at least 15 more full time staff and an additional 30 or more part time staff. In addition, we will create at least 20 independent entrepreneur positions whose job it will be to collect waste from clients and be paid by those clients to deliver the waste to our facility where the waste can be processed.

FdS Haiti is the first and longest continually operating social enterprise on the island of Hispaniola following the Mission Statement: FdS Haiti works to facilitate ecologically and socially beneficial development in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Local residents are consulted and empowered throughout the R & D and implementation process in a Co-Creation model. Each additional FdS project / program must be financially sustainable and be developed to build on existing FdS activities to grow an infrastructure / eco-system of mutually beneficial developmental activities in conjunction with community, international, and local partners. It is the policy and passion of the FdS team and FdS Director/Founder Kevin Adair to implement social and ecological solutions through the strategy of: Listen, Lead, Listen Again. First we listen to learn the needs and wants of the local population, then we offer leadership and logistics to best address the community’s issues, and then we listen again to see how to best adapt the solutions to the cultural context of the country. FdS has developed and scaled up with the specific focus of systematically addressing the waste and cooking issues of Haiti. The largest FdS implementation was owning and operating the PCBL landfill in Varon, DR, with over 60 employees. In Haiti our team size has ranged from 20 to 40 people.

Our current and recent clients in Haiti include: The US Embassy, the Canadian Embassy, the UN implementations, the World Bank, the German Embassy, Oxfam, and several private companies. We provide waste collection, sorting, separating, recycling, and secure document destruction services. We also produce briquettes and ecological stoves for individual and institutional clients. All of our clients choose FdS services because we are the most ecological waste-sector service provider in Haiti.

We are paid to collect waste and we are paid for the products we produce from that waste. FdS sorts materials for maximum local reuse, composting and recycling, a tested solution ready for countrywide escalation. Several municipalities have been identified for satellite FdS operations With 15 years working Haitian people (starting first in the DR), FdS has developed a systemic, integrated tested process to increase Haitian sustainability, employment, GDP, and ecological conservation. FdS researched dozens of previous introductions of recycled fuel briquettes that failed due to: low-quality briquette production, lack of appropriate stove technology, lack of training / leadership in the implementations, and refusal of project implementers to listen to the needs and desires of their intended customer base. FdS collects waste from clients, sorts, separates, composts, and recycles as much as possible, thus creating jobs and local biomass fuel. Haiti is ready for an ecological industrial revolution following a growth model, not a phase-out or exit-strategy model. FdS started producing stoves in 2013 and through a design-feedback-loop of Haitian cooks, FdS is now producing the Gen 8 BioBriquette Stove that the cooks strongly prefer to charcoal. FdS is expanding to recycling plastic with the development of technologies not available in Haiti. FdS briquettes are produced from the abundant paper, cardboard, and biomass waste products including bagasse and sawdust. The expanded plan is recycling large quantities of materials, composting, and ecological cooing implementations. FdS is expanding to provide full waste-processing, recycling and recycled product manufacturing sites in multiple Haitian locations.

Utilizing sustainable income from corporate, resort and hotel customers to subsidize the costs of the services that we provide for individual households. The Mayor has agreed to make it compulsory for all businesses (including resorts) in the municipality to utilize (and pay for) our services. This will turn the entire community into an Ecological Enterprise Zone. Our ecological development and project marketing / publicity is likely to bring other socially minded companies to the area to join our ecological development network. While we are eligible for donations, similar to any NGO, we use these funds for start-up and scale-up with all regular operations funded by our ongoing program-based income. This is a uniquely different model than traditional NGOs or corporations. The attention generated by our work will bring much needed positive publicity to Haiti and even increase tourism to our clients who are the resorts. Our financial sustainability is based on multiple virtuous cycles cross-benefiting each other and the people of Haiti.

FdS Haiti is the largest paper recycler in Haiti and FdS has recycled more material to finished products in Haiti since 2012 than any other Haitian recycling company. Other companies focus on collecting recyclable product for export. In fact, there are over 100,000 full 40-foot shipping-containers of recyclable materials exported from Haiti every year: this includes steel, used batteries, electronics, plastic, glass, aluminum, paper and cardboard. Each of those containers translates to 2 jobs for a full year that will be required to process those materials into a new product. Those jobs must remain in Haiti! Haiti must become a leader in the sector of production of finished recycled products. The FdS team has worked in the sector of recycling, ecology, waste and recycling in Haiti since 2012 and, prior to that, in the Dominican Republic 2006 - 2011. Part of the work in the Dominican Republic was operating a landfill, waste-collection and recycling service in the Punta Cana region, with over 20 hotels as the operation's clients.

Of the partnership sectors listed, our first specialty would be in overall sector technology knowledge and implementation experience. Our second specialty is cultural and practical local acceptance to develop and implement our co-creation model. We have experience in all of the sectors that we checked, but we are always interested in improving in every way we can. Thus, we would be very happy to work with the IADB team in all of these sectors and more to bring our solutions throughout Haiti, Latin America and the Caribbean, and eventually to the rest of the World's development.

The IADB has our top priority among potential financial partners. We have also received strong interest in this project from the European Investment Bank. We are planning to apply within the next few months with USAID DIV and NatGeo Explorers, and we are open to all suggestions for additional partnerships. We are open to sponsorships as well as donations and investment. We are directly work with any and all potential partners which share the FdS goals of working for the inclusive co-created development of the ecological and social development of Haiti and/or the Dominican Republic.