People are always asking us, ‘What’s next?’, well here is the short answer:
We are going to try to disrupt the failed, disengaged, industrial recycling system and donate a technology to the world that will be able to rescue the billions of aluminium cans that are NOT being recycled. And if we succeed we just may be able to help with the renewable heating revolution too.
And now for the long answer…
Problem
Each year in the UK tens of millions of aluminium cans are littered in our public spaces and over 2 billion aluminium cans don’t get recycled because they are put into the wrong bin. Why? There are a lot of contributing reasons: we are not engaged or in love with recycling, we don’t have the right incentives, like a deposit system, and we don’t foster a deep love for the materials we rely on for our home, our environment, this amazing planet that supports all known life. The problem gets worse, and we can't thank Keep Britain Tidy enough for highlighting it... if you include glass and plastic drinks containers too then this litter is responsible for the death of 3 million small mammals each year!
Solution
This is a complicated problem, so the solution we propose is also complex. Equally, given the scale of our environmental crisis, we must always strive for multiple positive objectives:
- Collect littered aluminium cans
- Hack the industrial aluminium recycling process by designing/building testing and open-sourcing a small scale renewably powered forge; we will be exploring all potential processes including, but not limited to mirrors, solar panels, lens designs, sintering and induction techniques. We have a few key goals for the machine:
- It must be safe
- It should be easy to build anywhere in the world for around $500.00
- It should be adaptable, and able to solve many other problems
- Design and manufacture hardware (buckles, clasps, D-Rings, rivets) and trial a ‘returns’ based circular business model for hardware. Elvis & Kresse will be the first to adopt this hardware for our belts and bags.
- Share our solution as widely as possible, with partners who can
- Use it to recycle all kinds of materials
- Use it to cook, purify water, run off-grid heating systems, etc.
- Use it to spur on a distributed and renewably powered manufacturing revolution!
Getting Involved
This open sourced project officially launches this month, in February 2020, and we would love for you to follow along and contribute. We are specifically looking for individuals who are keen to contribute:
- Engineering: The output is designed to be shared, so the better the machine we collaborate to design, the better the outcome for anyone who would like to use it:
- Anyone can contribute - we see 3 key contribution phases
- February - May: Bold ideas - initial brainstorming
- June - October: Landing the design
- October Onwards: Tweaks and other uses
- Legal: We would like this tech and all tech that stems from it to be used only for good. We would love to have some kind of ‘moral license’ to issue all designers and developers.
- Communications: Tell everyone you know!
