ReBlocks

Plastic Pollution is swamping our oceans and landfills which endangers ecosystems and public health. ReBlocks establishes a network of upstream integrated plastic recycling facilities in partnership with organisations to give meaningful employment to local rag-pickers across India, starting in Pune. While decentralised in its recycling units, located at source, ReBlocks remains centralised in management and manufacturing in order to provide high-quality and innovative use-cases for commonly recycled plastics.

The ReBlocks-owned operating process is designed for low upsetting-costs and simple and low-cost operations to enable the employment of low-skilled workers, rag-pickers, which work in both the procurement of raw material from landfills as well as the recycling process. The further processing of recycled plastic is designed to suit the needs for upstarting SMEs as well as existing sustainable brands. 

If scaled globally, the lives of millions of species could be protected and millions of rag-pickers could be lifted out of poverty.

Around 8 million tons of plastic enter the ocean every year. In the ocean, plastic turns into infinitely smaller pieces, microplastics which enter drinking water, and every organism we extract from the ocean for consumption, like fish. Hence, this poses dangers to global ecosystems and public health, especially affecting children and pregnant women. 

Example: Plastic Pollution threatening Marine Ecosystems

The current state of the economy is unsustainable and must be turned circular. The industry must use more recycled instead of newly produced plastic for manufacturing. 

ReBlocks aims to tackle this by offering “Manufacturing as a Service” only using recycled plastic. Moreover, employing rag-pickers at the source of this material, will help solve a problem of societal exclusion in India. Unofficial estimations pinpoint Pune in India to have 100,000 rag-pickers, people that spend their day on landfills, to make a living. This is where our pilot-site is located.

Through integrating all raw-material procurement, recycling and manufacturing, we are able to pay our employees an adequate wage. This will attract a greater workforce to mobilise a more circular economy in India. Engaging in research into innovative use-cases for recycled plastic will further advance this endeavour.

ReBlocks aims to serve two groups especially. These are: Rag-Pickers, Animal and Plant Species.

ReBlocks mostly focuses on helping the local economy in underdeveloped areas in this world. ReBlocks does this by (1) cooperating with pivotal charitable organisations that together offer meaningful employment to rag-pickers, (2) providing adequate technical up-skilling, due to the use of machinery and accounting methods at the workplace, (3) enabling micro-entrepreneurship through Microfinance programmes for its employees to open their very own recycling units. In Pune, estimations pinpoint 100,000 rag-pickers to work in the city. Today, these rag-pickers work 16h a day in dreadful conditions for almost no pay. With our value-adding process, we are able to pay them an adequate wage to live, while retaining a profit for the expansion of our impact.

Furthermore, ReBlocks deeply cares about the global environment. Therefore, ReBlocks aims to (1) clear plastic from critical spots at landfills near the ocean before it enters the waters, (2) educate the local community about sustainable uses of plastics and (3) encourage companies to integrate recycled plastic into their supply chains.

ReBlocks is a manufacturing business which decentralises but incorporates the procurement of raw materials. We offer plastic recycling and manufacturing of small to mid-sized moulded (injection moulding) plastic products. Our facilities are designed for low-setup-costs which allows for an easy scaling process to increase production capacity. 

Our process starts at “The Block” where we buy waste-plastic from rag-pickers above market rate to ensure a smooth flow of raw material procurement. After having washed, dried and sorted the different kinds of plastic, we use a shredder to process our plastic into pellets ready to use in semi-automatic moulding machines. 

In close cooperation with our partners on-site (Social Selva Initiatie, SWaCH), we are focussing on replicating “Blocks”, thus building a recycling network that gives meaningful employment to locals while cleaning up the surrounding landfills. In what follows the recycling process we use that material to provide “Manufacturing as a Service” to our clients (i.e. companies selling products entirely or partly made of recycled plastic). Our service will differentiate itself from current plastic manufacturing in three points:

First, with our in-house software development expertise, we build a platform to offer a digital process, that is completely guided by us from the 3D-Model to the final manufacturing of the product. Through our platform, we make information on the materials we use, our capacity for manufacturing and pricing easily accessible and comparable. Moreover, we will use the online platform to provide feedback on submitted designs utilising our in-house expertise for industrial design, post updates about the production process of each order and centralise the communication with our clients. This will allow us to serve our clients’ vision of their product with a high accuracy. 

Second, our proximity to the raw material, and to those who collect it gives us an unprecedented opportunity to engage in R&D, identifying new opportunities and use-cases for plastic we haven't yet dreamed of. This will allow the range of products produced from recycled plastic to increase.

Finally, our manufacturing process offers more than just a high-quality product in our client's hands. We offer a story of an extraordinary social and environmental impact as a crucial marketing notion to help our customers drive their business with a compelling value proposition. Our clients can pride themselves with helping us to tackle plastic pollution and its detrimental impact as well as to enable waste-pickers find more meaningful work to escape poverty.

We make plastic manufacturing easy and disrupt the industrial scale of the market. The machinery we use is intuitive while delivering high-quality standards. This enables us to employ rag-pickers which saves cost from labour while having a significant social impact as we pay them more than double what they normally earn. Moreover, the organisation of our business redefines how plastic recycling works today. We give rag-pickers a chance to contribute to a larger share of the value chain, going from just collection to the collection and recycling itself. With that, we choose a more inclusive approach to the current value chain. 

Moreover, we revolutionise the transparency of the supply chain. Look around you! Of how many products do you know the origin? Of how many products do you know who collected the raw materials, processed them and operated the machine to manufacture whatever is close to you? None? Exactly! We reconnect consumers to the products and allow all of us to develop a sense of understanding what holding a shampoo bottle in one’s hand really means. By making customers realise their impact, we can give our clients a far more powerful story about their products, thus giving them an even stronger market position relative to companies selling conventional plastic products.

We differentiate ourselves from conventional plastic manufacturers because we sell more than just a service. We sell a vision of world in which our economy is circular and we revolutionise the process of manufacturing.

Our solution relies on conventional plastic recycling and manufacturing machinery. However, choosing the aim of low set-up-costs, especially for our network of “Blocks” (recycling facilities), we shift towards labour-intensive quality assurance in “The Block”.

In order to coordinate the procurement of specific kinds of plastic for manufacturing, we use an advanced digital infrastructure which learns the abundance of the different kinds of plastic in different areas to efficiently “order” the right kinds of plastic in the right quantities from the right “Block”, a critical step to ensure high-quality standards of our products.

Finally, our overarching digital platform for client interaction will deploy sophisticated augmented reality by providing clients with updates of their order (e.g. prototypes) via 3D photography and augmented reality. 

ReBlocks solves the problem of plastic pollution in a very straightforward way. First, we collect plastic waste from landfills that otherwise would end up being burned or in the ocean. This is our first and very simple approach to solving one of the world’s most pressing issues.

Secondly, through our business model, we serve rag-pickers, that today live in poverty, with a more viable economic living situation. In other words, the wage we pay will enable our rag-pickers to live above the poverty line. Further, our employees will receive constant training on the job and take on increasing responsibility which allows them to develop skills crucial for further employment and become more independent. On top of that, we aim to enable our employees to become the owners of the means of production as well by offering them to open up new “Blocks” of their own, integrated into the overall management of ReBlocks, thus creating micro-entrepreneurs that can nurture the economic development of their local area.

Thirdly, we are not only shifting the way people connect with their products but we are also making the products we produce highly sustainable (although we still use machinery, electricity and must transport the plastic). If companies that sell products made of plastic do not follow this trend, we expect them to lose business soon when observing current trends in society, especially in Europe and the US that display plastic as the evil to abolish.

Today, we employ 25 rag-pickers in our pilot “Block”.

In one year, we plan to employ 300 rag-pickers in more than 25 “Blocks”.

In five years, we plan to employ more than 2,750 rag-pickers in more than 150 “Blocks”.

Note: This not only neglects the number of customers and end-consumers that will contribute to the real-world impact but more significantly neglects the number of people whose lives we will alleviate from the negative impacts of plastic on this planet. In Pune alone more than 3 million people breath toxic air that in part results from burning plastic waste.

Globally, the great majority of people eats and drinks microplastics every day. While it is impossible to make a judgment how many of these lives we will meaningfully affect, the easy replicability of our solution makes us confident that we can meaningfully affect the lives of millions of people and species on this planet (which in turn benefits humanity again, #biodiversity). 

Our solution has an unprecedented multiplier-effect. The more plastic we collect from landfills, the less plastic is burned to pollute the air and the less plastic is ending in the ocean, the less plastic ends up in our drinking water and food and the less plastic infringes biodiversity, the better the world.

Our goal is simple, within the next year we want to establish “Blocks” across the largest and most polluted Indian cities. This will clean Indian streets, reduce inequality and boost both well-being and the economy in India. In order to fund these operations we aim to partner with Maker-Spaces around the world to offer our services to upstarting companies, consultancies that offer sustainable product solutions for the apparel industry and engage in extensive client acquisition through internal and digital sales efforts.

Within the next five years, we envision ReBlocks to go international. While the Philippines are the first country we believe to be able to succeed due to the number of rag-pickers and plastic pollution, the great majority of countries on this planet serve our needs as a business. We aim to become the new standard for plastic manufacturing and sustainably change how the world connects with the products we use. Moreover, within five years, we aim to devote a significant amount of our profits to research and development to explore new ways to use plastic, better ways of plastic manufacturing and more cost-efficient operations.

We calculate set-up costs of $20,000 per “Block”. Hence, in order to achieve our goals, capital to scale our solution is crucial. 

Moreover, we are aware of cultural differences which especially in the Philippines are difficult to predict. This requires local expertise as we have established in India.

Lastly, plastic manufacturing is a long-established business and injection moulding is its flagship. In other words, injection moulding is highly advanced and therefore requires technical advisory to ensure high-quality of our products. Moreover, plastic itself is a science on its own. Therefore we must acquire advanced expertise on specific kinds of plastic and their use-cases.

Already, we have established a partnership with the Social Seva Initiative, to help overcome cultural barriers in Pune as well as acquire expertise on plastic recycling and manufacturing. From academics of the engineering department and WMG at the University of Warwick, we seek advice and guidance for plastic manufacturing and the chemical specifications and use-cases of different kinds of plastic building on the availability in Pune specifically.

For a potential financial bottleneck, we seek funding. Specifically, besides this application, we are working on a Kickstarter campaign with which we aim to be our own first customer. We plan to make eyewear made of recycled plastic. With this, we try to bootstrap our endeavour financially.

Jonathan Karl - full-time staff

Aaron Baw - full-time staff

Mads Hoefer - full-time staff

Paul Tanu - full-time staff

Nabeel Sroya-Vara - Advisor for Customer Relationships

Jayant Pai - Cultural & Manufacturing Advisor

As a Team of four individuals with very different disciplines, we unite knowledge from computer science, global sustainable development, business, mechanical engineering, politics, philosophy and economics. This enables us to build a business around our solution, understand its developmental implications, understand the technicalities of the product and build necessary digital infrastructure systems while continuously keeping course reaching from an ethical to the financial perspective. We believe this to be an essential part of our ability to solve the problems we address. This is further augmented by the creative strength of our team being able to digitise every idea in every form of media using the bandwidth of Adobe’s creative cloud to communicate our beliefs and ambitions effectively.

For the past year, we have been working on our solution, having established our first pilot-Block in Pune. This makes us confident to be able to establish ReBlocks as a self-sufficient social enterprise.

We are partnering with the Social Seva Initiative and SWaCH. Our main partner, the Social Seva Initiative helps us set-up the Blocks and facilitate the relationship with SWaCH and therefore the relationship with our employees which come to us through SWaCH.

ReBlocks offers to “Manufacturing as a Service”. This means, we can serve our key customers (SMEs, Apparel Industry) with an end-to-end solution for their manufacturing process. This includes (1) prototyping and iterating of new and existing product lines, (2) sustainable manufacturing from recycled plastic, (3) finishing (e.g. polishing) and (4) provision of impact story marketing material. This four-step-process is the overall product that we provide to SMEs that are either willing to expand to sustainable sourcing or upstarting entrepreneurs that want to join the industry as well as parts of the production of apparel companies interested to use recycled plastic for the finishing of their products. 

The overall product is brought to our customers via an interactive all-digital-platform that allows for easy communication and access to our knowledge-base to provide guidance throughout the four-step-process of manufacturing. Furthermore, it is the central place for transfer of storytelling material, order placement and updates. This includes seamless up-sales to our products (e.g. packaging) that further engage our key beneficiaries: rag-pickers in India (for the beginning).

ReBlock’s sustainable production process allows our customers to differentiate themselves with an extraordinary story of impact, a selling argument itself. By offering higher than average wages, opportunity for independence and education ReBlocks gives meaningful employment to an exluded population of India. Thus, ReBlocks redefines manufacturing, redefines the scale of a social and environmental impact that is possible in a companies supply chain and fuels the exploding market trend of end-consumer products, made from recycled plastic.

The possibilities of revenue-channels seem limitless. From selling raw recycled plastic to selling manufactured plastic products everything is theoretically possible. However, we aim to focus on serving SMEs that sell products made from recycled plastic as well as complementing the supply chain of established apparel companies. We aim to charge for the manufacturing process which prices the recycled plastic, moulds, the use of our machinery, required labour and utility costs plus our markup which we aim to use for scaling and R&D.

In the beginning, we believe raising investment capital to be a viable option to build manufacturing capabilities and acquire customers. The aforementioned Kickstarter campaign is aimed to help boost this process. However, in the long-run, we calculate that revenue from our customer relationships are sufficient to surpass our costs, drawing on the fact that ReBlocks not only provides a part of the supply chain, but a valuable selling argument for all of our clients.

We believe that difficult problems are solved by enough people that know enough about the particularities of these problems and by people that care. We are applying to Solve because someone may read this that cares or that knows someone that cares. We seek talent and advice to help push us forward. The funding we wouldn’t deny, however our aim here is to find more people that share our beliefs, to find more people that believe that we can make a difference to people’s lives with this idea. If you’re one of them, please connect with us and help us on our journey. Maybe you would even like to be a part of it.

We must distinguish between the science of plastic and manufacturing and the business model here. Academic departments of materials science or engineering have proven helpful to us (i.e. WMG)

Moreover, running a business holds many surprises and uncertainties which we believe experience can help tackle. Therefore we don’t seek partnerships with an organisation here but with experienced professionals from businesses.

Lastly, we seek partnerships with potential customers. Thousands of companies sell products that involve injection-moulded plastic in some way. We seek the dialogue with these companies to help them drive their business forward and innovate in their supply chain as well as further learn about the needs that we can serve.

We must distinguish between the science of plastic and manufacturing and the business model here. Academic departments of materials science or engineering have proven helpful to us (i.e. WMG)

Moreover, running a business holds many surprises and uncertainties which we believe experience can help tackle. Therefore we don’t seek partnerships with an organisation here but with experienced professionals from businesses.

Lastly, we seek partnerships with potential customers. Thousands of companies sell products that involve injection-moulded plastic in some way. We seek the dialogue with these companies to help them drive their business forward and innovate in their supply chain as well as further learn about the needs that we can serve.