Building advanced recycling capabilities

The challenge

GEO Trash Management (GTM) partners with various non-for profit organisations undertaking beach, ocean, river and street clean-ups, promoting up-cycling via eco-sustainable projects and providing educational outreach services on Lombok. They also support single use plastic reduction efforts on the islands.

However, the success of clean-up activities on the islands has eclipsed the capacity of the community to re-use and upcycle the plastic they are collecting.

Our response

As part of a grant from the Indo-Pacific Plastics Innovation Network, we’re working with GTM to provide waste to resource solutions focused on community collection networks and environmental conservation.

Our design collaboration agreement will help build purification systems for GTM’s advanced recycling process.

GTM partnered with the NTB provincial government to plan a roll-out of their technology. Data from pilot trials will allow the World Health Organization to examine the environmental health credentials of the technology and the application to some specific tropical environmental health challenges.

GTM is implementing advanced recycling (AR) technology appropriate to their island economy’s needs. This form of AR (pyrolysis) converts plastic to oils that can be used as conventional fuels or sold into the growing ‘plastic-to-plastic’ recycling market.

GTM is pursuing an AR route to generate immediate and long-term benefits.

Impact

GTM has established community building through engineering workshops on Lombok to employ local people. They intend to create recycling machines for local use and for export throughout the region, and the world.

The deployment of these systems in the short-term creates clean, secure supplies of transport fuels for the community, with a long-term export market identified for the products.

GTM is adopting circular economy principles by turning plastic pollution into valuable resources. This boosts local economies.