DAVAO CITY—A new partnership here between a shopping mall and a branded-consumer food and beverage product firm would re-channel the wastage of single-use plastics, like plastic bottles of drinking water, to an important item in classrooms: the school desk.

Under the agreement between Universal Robina Corp. (URC) and the New City Commercial Center (NCCC), plastic bottles inside the latter’s chain of stores will be collected and sent to the Envirotech Waste Recycling Inc. (EWRI), outside downtown, the recycler’s president and chief executive officer, Winchester O. Lemen, told the BusinessMirror.

Envirotech Waste Recycling Inc. (EWRI ) President and CEO Winchester O. Lemen (in white polo shirt, right) poses with his firm’s partners—Universal Robina Corp. (URC ) and the New City Commercial Center (NCCC )—in an initiative to collect plastic bottles from the mall and retailer chain and have these recycled by EWRI into school desks for Davao children.

Lemen, who some have called the “recycled-plastic” king, said executives of URC and NCCC have identified Matina, a village west of the international airport, as the first recipient of 50 desks to be manufactured from the collected plastic bottles.

A collection bin will be placed inside the more than 30 stores of NCCC, according to the former Red Bulls cager. Lemen estimates EWRI would be able to collect between 5 to 10 kilograms of plastic.

Based on the agreement, EWRI is tasked to manufacture the plastic desk, a product it has been making since 2010.

“I think the plan of the partnership is eventually to distribute 50 desks for free to each school in Matina,” he said.

The URC recycling project was launched here for the Mindanao area on August 17 and will be followed soon in the Visayas and Luzon. URC tapped EWRI for the publicly listed firm’s implementation of its national project, according to Lemen.

“The focus right now is on the single-use plastics like drinking bottles,” he said.

A mission

LEMEN said recycling plastics for usable materials like a school desk was an idea that “no one believed when we started it” nine years ago.

He said his team went as far to the north in Hinatuan, Surigao del Sur, and down south in Esperanza, South Cotabato.

“That time, EWRI was able to collect only a few sacks of plastics from the landfill in this city,” Lemen said, adding that his firm doesn’t make or import plastics to make school chairs.

“Ours is to help the environment recycle these plastics and put less pressure on the environment,” he told the BusinessMirror. “Imagine that we are no longer cutting one tree to make a chair.”

According to Lemen, a graduate of Mechanical Engineering from Mapua Institute of Technology, “many local governments were happy helping us collect their plastic waste when we made the presentation a year later [2011].”

With local governments and communities now convinced, EWRI currently has 400 tons of plastic stored in its warehouse.

That is enough for an operation of five months, according to Lemen.

Will be here

EWRI’s recycling plant in Sasa, some 11 kilometers north of downtown, uses an average of 60 tons to 90 tons a month of plastic to produce 2,000 pieces of school chairs. The plant produces 70 desks a day.

The NCCC-URC partnership would boost the firm’s production volume.

On a commercial basis, his company sells a desk for P1,700 for private and public schools, mostly in Metro Manila. But with the plastic to be donated from these bins, his company would be selling it 10 percent lower, or about P1,530 per piece.

“The beauty of this chair is it can last for 20 years and, if there’s a part that would be broken, we can replace it for free,” he said. “They can be assured that we will still be here for the next 20 to 40 years.”

Into housing

Before the end of the year, Lemen said his company will roll out the first models of a 28-square-meter plastic house, measuring 7 meters long and 4 meters wide. He said it would be a habitable house that is more durable than the current design of housing units.

“It’s 85-percent made of plastics and would cost only P300,000,” he said adding a member of the Home Development Mutual Fund, or Pag-IBIG Fund would pay only P2,000 for monthly amortization.

“The [additional] advantage with this is it would take only one day to build,” he said. “That’s [also] 3 tons of plastics away from being [dumped] and 3 tons of precious wood or cement materials.”

He said he came up with the idea to help fill the housing backlog running at 5.7 million units.

Lemen said they plan to roll out the house project in November or December this year.

Since 2010 EWRI has produced 300,000 pieces of school desks. And Lemen began much earlier than a television program that collects plastic bottles for its noontime community program.

“Because we started earlier than [this noontime TV show], we have to do a lot of explaining, especially that we get the bulk of plastics from dump sites,” he said.

He said he hoped his advocacy would go a long way for the environment “because we would save several trees; we would not cut a tree anymore.”

Hopefully, Lemen would continue his “dump-diving,” of sorts.

Source: Young engineer wastes no time in reusing refuse | BusinessMirror
by Manuel Cayon / Business Mirror

HIS story of recycling trashed plastics and making these into colorful school chairs went the rounds in social media as it grabbed the attention of several television news programs in the past three months although Winchester O. Lemen, the man behind the plastic chairs and founder of Envirotech Waste Recycling Inc. (Envirotech), has been at it since 2010.

Just before New Year, Lemen with his family paid a courtesy call on President Rodrigo R. Duterte in Bahay Pangarap, the official residence of the President in Malacañang, where the President got to see a prototype of Envirotech’s school desk and affix his signature on this.

The bigger story, however, is not about the colorful plastic school chairs.

Rather, it is in Envirotech’s trade secret and breakthrough technology.

 

Melting point

Lemen developed a technology that could melt all kinds of trash plastics all in one furnace.

“Kahit sinong itanong mo na scholar diyan, sasabihin sa iyong: Cannot be,” he said.

There are seven major kinds of plastics: The Polyethylene Terephthalate (Pete or Pet), most commonly used to make containers for packaging foods and beverages, personal care products, and many other consumer products; High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE) commonly used for corrosion resistant pipes, geomembranes, and plastic lumber; Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) used for a wider range of applications like drainpipes and fittings, flexible films and tubes, cables, and others; Low-Density Polyethylene, whose most common use is for plastic bags and dispenser bottles; Polypropylene (PP), widely used in the industrial sector because it is stiffer and resistant to chemicals and organic solvents; Polystyrene or Styrofoam (PS); and miscellaneous plastics that include: polycarbonate, polylactide, acrylic, acrylonitrile butadiene, styrene, fiberglass, and nylon.

Most recyclers can only do Pet, PP, and PVC. But only separately. Like the most recycled plastics in Mexico, which is high in plastic recycling, is PET.

All seven plastics have different applications, strengths, properties, and melting points ranging from 105 Centigrade to 250 Centigrade. This is where the tricky part comes. Because of their different melting points, the different kinds of plastics are best melted separately and at different lengths of time lest some will already be turned into ash while others will become toxic before the rest could melt.

Lemen figured how to just mix them all up, a breakthrough seen to be impossible by recyclers, including international ones.

From cannot be, it became can be.

 

Recycling polybags

Lemen worked on this technology after finding himself eased out of the recyclable plastics market where he started out.

“Noong nire-recycle ko na, nakita na ng iba. Sabay-sabay silang pumasok ngayon. Nakita nila, big ang market ng banana. Imagine, one hectare (of banana plantation) is 1,000 hills and 1,000 plastic bags is eight kilos of plastics, 50,000 hectares ang buong sagingan sa Mindanao. Ang dami noon,” he said.

He ended up being eased out because the bigger recyclers, including Taiwanese, can afford to buy them at a higher price. The competition grew such that from a very low P3.50 per kilo, the price of used polybags is now at P14 per kilo.

 

The mother of innovation

This did not discourage him. He instead focused on what plastics are not being recycled. He found out that plastic wrappers are what made up a bulk of residual wastes that all end up at the city landfill. Nobody in the recycling business wants them.

“Naisip ko, sige, try natin na dito tayo sa hindi na nila napapakinabangan (Let’s work on these waste that no one needs), he said.

His experiment took six years.

Having been able to melt the assorted plastics together and produce a material that has the strength, the result became the foundation of Envirotech now: assorted plastics including candy and detergent wrappers made into durable products, such that the tiebox that he now produces is greater in strength than what his competitors in the used polybag market could make.

Envirotech was thus born in June 2010 and has since been improving on its technology and products while providing communities and local government units the answer to what to do with the most pesky of wastes — including plastics that pollute the sea.

There’s a lot of work ahead, however, in gathering all these and keeping these out of the environment to be made into useful materials, whether it be for furniture or for construction.

Being the pioneer, Lemen has his work cut out for him as communities continue to struggle with the problem of garbage.

Source: The genius in plastic recycling – SUNSTAR
by STELLA ESTREMERA / SUNSTAR

He still remembers his father telling him that one day, he will become the next biggest plastics manufacturer in the country.

Winchester O. Lemen took his father’s word so seriously that he ended up recycling soft plastic wastes mined from landfills and turning these into classroom chairs, park benches, and soon, perhaps, a house.

Lemen’s father, Marcelo, who owned EuroPlastico, which is based in Malinta District in Davao City, was among the first to manufacture Styrofoam products in the country in the 1970s.

By recycling soft plastics from discarded shampoo sachets, candy and junk food wrappers, Lemen, president and chief executive officer of Envirotech Waste Recycling Inc., says he can easily reduce the volume of waste clogging drainage canals and filling the landfills of major towns and cities in the country.

Envirotech aims to be a part of the movement to regain ecological intelligence and balance. It has a plant in Bunawan District, also in Davao City.

Soft plastics

“What we collect are only soft plastics, not the hard plastics, which still has value for junk shops,” says Lemen, a mechanical engineer by profession. His chairs, park benches and decking pieces can easily be mistaken for real wood, and could last up to 20 years, way above the five-year average life-span of wooden chairs, he says.

Lemen is trying to convince as many local government units in the country to allow him to make use of the existing wastes in their landfill for his raw materials.

A councilor in Quezon City, who ordered 60 pieces of Lemen’s products, plans to sponsor a resolution banning wooden chairs in city classrooms to protect the environment. “It’s his way of helping save the trees,” Lemen says.

“One small chair made entirely of recycled plastics can help save one 3-year-old tree, while helping fill the shortage of chairs in the classroom,” he says.

ANOTHER product made of recycled plastics, a bench, is displayed in the house of Lemen in Davao City. GERMELINA LACORTE

A year after settling in Davao City in 2001, Lemen put up his first company, Redwood Logistics Corp., to produce corner posts for banana plantations out of discarded polybag plastics. But the cost of the materials kept going up so he started looking for other possible sources.

Tagum landfill

In a landfill in Tagum City in Davao del Norte, he found a rich repository of discarded plastics. In 2010, Tagum Mayor Rey Uy allowed him to make use of the garbage.

Over eight months, Lemen hauled 800 tons of mixed plastic wastes, reducing largely the volume of trash.

“I first recycled (the garbage) into school chairs. When I was able to make the perfect chair for schools, the Quezon City councilor gave his order,” he says.

One chair costs only P700, a bit lower than the P900 for an armchair made of wood and steel. Plastic monobloc chairs cost P1,100 apiece.

Other areas in the country followed Tagum. Envirotech now has an agreement with the barangay chair of Calinan District in Davao City; the towns of Panabo, Kapalong and Sto. Tomas in Davao del Norte; Hinatuan in Surigao del Sur; Compostela town in Compostela Valley; Agusan del Sur; Isulan town in Sultan Kudarat; Koronadal City in South Cotabato; and Balut Island in Sarangani.

More inquiries

“From north to south, from Visayas to Luzon, everybody was inquiring about this technology,” Lemen says.

He says a town of La Union in Luzon is working on a resolution to give him a place where he can recycle plastic materials. While in Cebu, an Envirotech partner is putting up a plant to convert biodegradable wastes in Mandaue City into biogas, scheduled to start operation next year.

In Davao City, he says, he can help a lot in decreasing its waste volume. The city government had contended with 600 tons of waste a month before it implemented a plastic ban ordinance that reduced the volume to 400 tons.

“After I start in Calinan, hopefully, the rest of the barangays will follow,  I can saturate the lower part of (Davao) city,” Lemen says.

Gov’t support

Right now, Envirotech can produce 2,000 chairs a month, using the manually pressed system. Lemen is appealing for government help so he can come up with an automated system that will greatly reduce the volume of plastics in the landfill.

The company also produces pavement and walling blocks, and floor and roof tiles, With these products, Lemen says, he plans to make an entire house out of recycled soft plastics.

“The maximum temperature during the day is less than 40 degrees Celsius and is way below the 300 to 500 degrees when plastics begin to melt,” he says. “So, it’s safe to build a house made entirely of recycled soft plastics.”

“It won’t be long from now,” he says.

Source: Davao City’s recycled plastics king | Inquirer News

by Germelina Lacorte | INQUIRER