100% Circular Closed Loop System for Plastic Bottles

Today, there is a vicious cycle in the developing and developed world in regards to poverty, solid municipal waste (e.g., plastic bottles) and a lack of clean water.  The goal of this project is to unravel these factors from negatively impacting each other to resolving the industrial, social, and environmental challenges through a community based supply chain approach where the benefits are achieved by the affected communities.  Our solution is a closed loop system for plastic bottles that provides clean water, social entrepreneurship and environmental sustainability to the most impact communities in the world.  Because our solution is a small-scale, community based system that is profitable without public assistance, it can be deployed easily and quickly across the planet to the hundreds of millions, if not billions, impacted by this problem.

A vicious cycle exists in the developing and developed world between poverty, environmental waste, and the availability of clean water.  Presently, there are 750 million people in the world living without clean water, 2.5 billion living without adequate sanitation, and the same amount of people living in extreme poverty, defined as an income of under $2 a day, according to the U.N.  In the developed world, this is less of a problem, but a crisis still exists in places like Flint, Michigan, poor rural areas, and Native American tribal areas.  

In these areas, individuals must go to great lengths to fetch clean water or packaging waste to turn into a living, and this impacts the quality of their lives, including their children, who are unable to go to school.  A lack of proper sanitation to address the growing problem of packaging waste leads to the perpetuation of the waste picker role in the developing world that consists of 1-2% of the world's population, according to the World Bank.  

Our goal is to work with populations across the developed and developing world that are facing these problems that are remarkably consistent across cultures and socioeconomic regions of the world.  Across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the U.S., we have discussed this population across the targeted stakeholders, and understand how our solution can assist in this problem of the vicious cycle between poverty, environmental waste and clean water.  

Because each of these communities are affected by the same factors of a global industrial supply chain and its impact on society and the environment, the solution of creating "Community Based Supply Chains" works consistently well in each of these geographies.  For them meaningful change includes better access to clean water, higher wages, and a re-manufacturing of plastic waste.

The solution will address these needs through a community based approach to supply chains that reverses the adverse impact of solid waste and a lack of clean water onto poverty conditions and vice versa.

Our innovation is a community-based supply chain for developing nations and inner-city communities in the developed world to achieve high recycling rates and economic development while reducing the cost of bottled water and eliminating plastic waste in a closed loop system. 

Our proposed solution is modular, with each element profitable as a standalone element:

• Part 1 - a water purification and bottling operation (1 liter) able to commercially produce 8,000 packaged bottles a day.  The system will also produce bulk water (545,000 liters or 5 liters/citizen, per 100,000) funded through the commercial operation to no cost to the community. 
• Part 2 – a standalone, profitable recycling plant (de-polymerization) for PET plastic bottles and aluminum cans achieving high yield/reuse rates.
• Part 3 – a PET resin facility that closes the loop (re-polymerization) of the supply chain system by returning the monomers back to a polymer.  This is a future state research project in process.

This solution can achieve socioeconomic and environmental benefits not possible using conventional methods: a 90%+ recycling rate, the monetization of used beverage containers (plastic and aluminum UBC) without government legislation, and the enablement of manufacturing in depressed communities through the production of commercial grade chemicals from plastic waste.  There is also the added benefit, via synergies, to be able to profitably purify and package bottle water for sale locally within the community, and even to use the profitability of the system to fund a bulk water purification project as necessary.  In comparison to large, regional corporate operations, our recycling plant is community based, processing 1,000 tons of PET plastic bottle waste in a year and 500 tons of aluminum cans, therefore, and relieving pressure off strained municipal landfill and incineration facilities.  Our chemical recycling technology (hydrolysis) is more environmentally friendly and economically viable than conventional methods and is able to scale to a community based solution through our supply chain design.

The goal is for the community to have local ownership for its benefit of self-reliance, environmental sustainability and poverty eradication.

Tied to the Peter Drucker quote above, the challenges that we are facing today across the planet relating to poverty, environmental impact, and clean water can be addressed if we can redefine the supply chain system in more properly using them.  The system will use an existing (but continually improving) patent for chemical recycling and commercial application for water purification and packaging to suit a small-scale community based solution rather than a large supply chain system.  As a result, this solution is not dependent on proving any cutting edge technologies in order to address such a massive global challenge.  It is a modification of supply chain, socioeconomic and market dynamics to solve a major challenge in our world today.

Beyond existing technologies in water purification and packaging, our primary technology is the use of a chemical recycling patent (hydrolysis) within a small scale operation in order to achieve high material yields at lower energy and pressure levels to make it safe to use in a developing community.  In contrast to large scale, other forms of chemical recycling that are more dangerous and must be restricted to more controls and technical experts that precludes its use in developing communities, ours can lead to a re-manufacturing operation with plastic waste as a feedstock in order to lead to economic growth, jobs and higher wages for the most affected in the poorest regions of the world.  

Ours is a proven technical and even supply chain solution, but it is a combination of the best from the developed and developing world to lead to disruptive innovation.

We expect our solution to work for the following reasons:

1) Our chemical recycling patent has been proven in a pilot setting, and we have data to attest to its success.

2) Our water purification/bottling operation is a commercial technology.

3) Our overall supply chain design is detailed in a 50 page business case, and has been reviewed in an international chemistry competition as well as under review with various government organizations in the U.S. and abroad.

Our solution is serving the following/anticipated to do so:

1) Present: 0

2) One year: hopefully a pilot for our first community (100,000)

3) Five years: hopefully millions across the world in community based systems.

Our goals for this system is as follows:

• Monetize used beverage containers (UBC) without government legislation, therefore, offering the benefits directly to the waste pickers in the community who are often disadvantaged or unemployable (such as the homeless).
• Enable a SME entrepreneur or a community based coop to operate the system, licensed through our partnership.  
• Eventually, establish a start-up operation for other plastic recycling circular economic system such as PP, PE, and PC.  Over three years, our goal is for all of these materials to be in a closed looped system.
• Enable the start-up of a micro-chemical industry in the inner city for the re-manufacturing of high grade MEG, TPA, and NASO4, potentially leading to growth in process manufacturing.
• Create an economic multiplier effect where earnings from profitable ventures (aluminum, bottled water) can be reinvested to improve the effectiveness of the recycling operation to reduce waste and poverty.
• Be able to replicate this supply chain model in other communities (create a hub and spoke supply chain system) and developing nations.

Listed below are the barriers or challenges to our project:

1) Creating scalable markets for the output of the chemical recycling process - the end product from the process will be commercial grade monomers (prior to the re-polymerization stage of the project), and we will need to create markets for these materials to compete against larger, economy of scale conventional providers in this market.

2) Socio-political barriers to change - we are not underestimating the socio-political barriers within local communities across the planet.  Just because a viable solution exists doesn't necessarily mean that change can occur.  The good news, however, is that our solution is not requiring public funding, but nevertheless, it could run into licensing and regulatory challenges if there was opposition, for some reason.

3) The need for a paradigm shift in the recycling movement - conventional wisdom is strong that "all we have to do is recycle", and there's a strong bias toward publicly mandated programs to solve the problem, but doesn't address the real problem that is the focus of our system.  

1) Scalable Markets from Chemical Recycling Process - first, we believe we will be able to go to sell a market viable product from both a cost and quality standpoint.  The challenge is to compete against a larger, economy of scale supply chain system.  Given the good that will come from this system in the form of reduced waste and higher wages, we believe we can overcome market factors in order to sell our product, and can provide sufficient details (in our business case) relating to our rationale.

2) Socio-political barriers to change - we believe that in some regions of the world/U.S., we will not be able to initially overcome these barriers, but our goal is to start implementing our system in "socio-political friendly" regions in order to justify its viable, and then change will happen in these other areas as well.

3) Paradigm shift in recycling community - this will be overcome through higher recycling and reuse rates; as opposed to 10-15% recycling/reuse rates for PET bottles, our system will produce 97%.  This will lead to a paradigm shift in the industry.

Ours is a partnership across two universities (University of Denver in the U.S., and Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico).

This is a pilot design created primarily by two researchers (Jack Buffington, University of Denver and Arturo Fregoso, Universidad Iberoamericana) with the support of others across the university.  We also have partnerships in various countries (Gerhardt Boois in Namibia), and with NGOs (such as the Meridian Institute and Five Gyres Institute in the U.S.).

We are best suited to work on this solution for the following reasons:

1) Jack Buffington has been an executive in the consumer products industry in the U.S. so he understands at an expert level how today's bottled water supply chain system works.

2) The technical solution provider (Universidad Iberoamericana) has expert level proficiency in the solution to fit the community based supply chain system.

3) Jack Buffington is a leading researcher from his Ph.D. in Sweden regarding the use of supply chains to solve large world problems.

We have partnerships with the following:

1) Meridian Institute

2) Five Gyres Institute

3) Institute for Local Self-Reliance

4) Commercial and Entrepreneurial partnerships to be later disclosed.

5) State and National government partnerships to be later disclosed.

Our business model is a modular solution that can be micro-scaled to a specific community; it does not rely on a certain level of stakeholders or communities to be involved, and is able to be funded, both operationally and from an investment standpoint, as a stand-alone project.  

It is also our goal to license our system solution to local communities in the form of a social entrepreneurship approach; the partner universities will not profit from this system, and will only receive a nominal fee to fund its involvement in the ventures.  The goal of this solution is to enable community based supply chains by providing a form of self-reliance to these communities.  All parties involved in this solution are aware of this as a primary goal.

The details of the operational/investment business model is provided in the detailed business case.

Our goal is to fund each community based supply chain system through donations and grants that support the goals of the project.  The funding support is for the chemical recycling and water purification/bottling capital investment and some peripheral capital costs.

Once the project is funded, the community based supply chain system will be self-funding through its operation.  The partner universities will remain involved in these projects in an advisory role to ensure its financial sustainability.

We believe that Solve is a progressive approach to solving world problems, and by partnering with your organization and enabling us to achieve our first piloted operation, we will have gained the credibility and exposure to further deploy this solution across communities and the world.

We would like Solve to be involved in our pilot operation somewhere in the world (we have targeted locations that Solve can review).  

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