Future of KR
Unfortunately, our plans to continue design work in Spring and Summer 2020 were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, in which students were required to study from home. Our primary design space, The Dyson Centre, was now inaccessible and we had to make many adjustments to our approach. With access to in-person meetings and rapid-prototyping equipment cut off, the restrictions forced the team to think in more depth about the fundamental questions underpinning Kilifi Recycle that had been undermined by the team's focus on technical innovation.
We used this opportunity to try and address some of the bigger non-technical issues with our project. One of the key issues we identified with Kilifi Recycle is getting enough plastic to make bricks at a commercial rate: each brick required about 60 bricks. We used up about half the supply the community had been collecting for a year within a few days. For small communities like Takaungu, plastic bottles were not too common and often only came into the village when there were big events such as weddings. Even with this, the bottles are often reused one or two more times before they are treated as ‘waste’. These uses included packaging homemade juice to be sold to neighbours and also things like cooking and motor oil. One of the key issues we would have to address is how to get an adequate amount of plastic to Takaungu and future communities we worked with. Over the three months we looked into the issues of plastic waste and recycling to see if we could find a solution. This is what we found:
Across the world recycling plastic is not seen as economical - it often takes more to collect and recycle the plastic than the plastic itself is worth - which means huge acres of plastic waste are being built up across the world
Previously countries such as UK, the US and Australia would export their plastic to countries like China were labour was cheaper and plastic could be recycled more economically but since China closed its border to plastic waste in 2017 these countries have struggled to know what to do with their plastic waste - previously China used to recycle almost half of the world's plastic waste
Informal waste picker economies in countries like India and Ghana are doing a great job at keeping waste off the streets and some have managed to strike a deal with local governments to be the official wats collectors for the council - this ends up being cheaper for the council and the people
There are often communities of people living in landfill sites who make a living from scavenging waste from the landfill waste and selling them to other people, unfortunately the price of these materials are quite low and communities struggle to live safely and comfortably on this
Our research also showed us that there are a number of people popping up around the world turning plastic waste into construction materials just like Kilifi Recycle. This provided an interesting opportunity for us to learn more about how other people are doing it to share and exchange ideas. We did this and reached out to groups in Nigeria, the Gambia and Ethiopia. Through these discussions we realized that what would really help to boost the wastprunership economy would be a way for everyone to share their learnings in this industry.
By the end of the summer, although cases of coronavirus were dropping in the UK, most of our learning was still virtual and we couldn’t use the workshop space to develop design. Instead, we decided to focus our efforts on creating a platform for sharing ideas for turning plastic waste into value that other communities can learn from and add to.