Scouting the web we’ve recently come across this beautiful Precious Plastic workshop in the city of Jacmel, Haiti. Truly amazing effort to bring a plastic recycling workshop to one of the poorest countries in the world.

In this detailed article Simon Clark, a volunteer from Diyode, takes us through his impervious journey setting up a small recycling facility in a remote area of one of the poorest countries in the world where scarce electricity, difficulties to source materials and absolute poverty makes it particularly arduous to build Precious Plastic machines and start recycling the rivers of plastic trash populating the landscape.

We truly admire people like Simon taking on great challenges and investing their own time, money and resources to bring about change to help the underprivileged. Big challenges come with big risks that might lead to some degree of failure (beyond silicon valley cheap rhetoric of failure).

Reading the article it is clear how Simon project is not immune to that, “I started this project with a simple goal in mind. Build the 4 machines..” unfortunately, however, “When I left Haiti last week, I walked away from one functional machine, one untested machine, and one that barely worked at all. The fourth machine, we didn’t even try.”

On his blog post Simon frankly highlights one of the common misconceptions about Precious Plastic, “.. my first mistake was thinking that using an evening or so a week, and maybe some time on Saturday mornings was enough time to get these built.”
Precious Plastic is not a plug & play kickstarter gizmo. It requires time, dedication, investment and love if you want to get started and create some real impact.

The rest of the article is full of detailed descriptions of the building process for each machine and the problems he encountered all throughout. Cutting shredder parts in China and sending them to US, sourcing extrusion screw, stainless steel welding warp problems, finding an electrical oven in countries with intermitted electricity and a many more.
If you’re thinking of starting Precious Plastic in a developing country this article is a must read!

Big shout to Simon and his team for the great efforts to bring solutions to Haiti and its people.
Hopefully, we can see some recycled products soon!

‍