2020 Teens Dream - Zero Waste
My dream is for a world with zero waste, plastic waste in particular. According to National Geographic, 91% of plastic isn’t recycled, leaving 7,535,000 metric tons of plastic, the amount of plastic we have produced is the equivalent of 25,000 Empire State Buildings or 75 million Boeing 787 Dreamliners. Meaning that there are over 67 million Boeing 787s or 23,000 Empire state buildings worth of plastic that is not recycled.
Plastic bottles specifically are one of the largest contributors to plastic waste, only about 29.6% of all plastic bottles are recycled each year, and over 1,000,000,000,000 bottles are used annually, that means over 700,000,000,000 plastic bottles are either sent to landfills or even worse, polluted. To show you how large that number is, it takes roughly 200 million plastic bottles to circle the earth, and with the number of plastic bottles that aren’t recycled each year we can circle the entire earth 3,500 times!! Let me repeat that, 3,500 times around the EARTH!
My goal is to contribute to SDGs 9, 11, 12, 13, & 14 by helping create a more circular economy and find solutions in my community to have closed loop manufacturing. I would like to find something that volunteers and I can directly work on and I believe have found a specific solution that we can implement.
I hope to work with plastic recyclers, and start a community micro manufacturer to convert PET bottle waste into 3D printer filament that can then be used to print and produce useful products and solutions that address our community’s needs.
Through this project we aim to create economic value from waste, and also reduce our carbon footprint by having local micro-manufacturing of filament and therefore, eliminating long distance shipping associated with international deliveries.
Why 3D printer filament? With a annual growth rate of 23% the 3D printing market ensures consistent demand, making it a sustainable project, and because 3D printing/additive manufacturing is less wasteful, and positively contributes to several other SDGs, since it decreases the amount of unwanted/wasted output, and because its on demand manufacturing it needs less storage, and decreases overproduction.
Through this, We will also create economic value from waste, and reduce carbon footprint by local micro-manufacturing of filament, avoiding long distance shipping.
I hope to see similar closed loop/zero waste micro-manufacturers of recycled plastic 3D printer filament partnering with plastic recyclers around the world.