Winchester Lemen is a mechanical engineer from Davao City, Philippines. Recently, this engineer has been using his skills for the greater good as he is running an environmental project which reduces plastic waste and turns it into plastic school chairs instead for the benefit of school children.
This initiative only started when someone came to visit Lemen, who runs Envirotech Waste Recycling, at his plant. During this time, the visitor pondered on whether Lemen could create something from the recycled plastic, according to The Recovery Crate. After this visit, Lemen regularly went to landfills to gather plastic garbage where he would melt them to create his prototypes.
Amazed at what Lemen presented him with after his inquiry, the visitor immediately ordered 200 of the chairs that Lemen made. “Little did I know that he showed the chairs to Quezon City Mayor Herbert Bautista. After that, they created a ‘Green Fund’ for this particular project, ” Lemen shared in an interview with SmartParenting.
In 2017, Lemen has begun to collaborate with Derrick Tan, an entrepreneur-slash-environmentalist, where together they established Winder Recycling Company. “This is a partnership that helps create jobs, helps with reforestation and solves the problem of plastic waste,” according to Lemen.
Winder Recycling Company believes that their project to create colorful school chairs out of plastic garbage will have a great impact on helping resolve a big problem in the Philippine education system.
“We have a huge backlog of 1.7 million school chairs in our country. One of our objectives is to reduce the gap. The chairs can be used for a very long time, so we do not have to change them every year as was practiced in the past. Plastic bags, candy wrappers, drinking straws, food packaging, and others are used to create the school chairs. These plastic wastes are shredded, cleaned, melted, and then molded. Afterward, the chairs are then assembled, sanded, and painted,” they mentioned. Likewise, he also mentioned: “We are saving a three-year-old tree, which is used to manufacture school chairs, for every plastic chair that we make using recycled plastic waste.”
In relation to recycled plastic garbage, here are 7 products that are made out of recycled plastic.
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