From plastic waste to better homes in Nepal
Every day, another 600 tonnes of plastic waste end up littering Nepal’s streets and mountains, often with dire consequences. The country has seen a dramatic increase in plastic imports over the last decade, and although they are a resilient, convenient and versatile group of materials, plastics require responsible management to prevent damage to people, animals and the environment.
Dr Curie Park, of the Centre for Industrial Sustainability, set up the Plastic to Ghar (P2G) project in 2022. “Ghar” means “house” in Nepali, and the aim of P2G is to set up local innovation capacity to tackle Nepal’s plastic waste problem by turning it into a solution to other pressing problems. With support from the Sustainable Manufacturing and Environmental Pollution Programme (SMEP, funded by UK Aid and UNCTAD), which covers 13 intervention areas in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, Curie and the local teams are about to enter the penultimate phase of their project, which sees plastic waste transformed into useful housing materials, and communities transformed into hubs for innovation.
The plastic pollution problem
Diversity is a defining feature of Nepal, encompassing both cultural and geographical elements. With altitudes ranging from 70 to over 8,848 meters above sea level, many inhabited areas face challenges connecting to robust waste-management systems due to the rugged topography. Trekking is the only way to transport things from A to B, and villagers find it difficult to take the waste back to town. Across the country, it is common to see open fires for plastic burning that produce toxic fumes, especially where households are out of reach of collection systems because of the rugged topography. Where plastic accumulates in large landfills, burning leads to even greater harm, including the deaths of livestock in the area.
The plastic pollution problem co-exists with two other significant challenges: poor housing and deforestation. Generally speaking, there is no concept of thermal and sound insulation in most Nepali homes. As a consequence of the devastating 2015 earthquake, which left nearly 3.5 million people homeless, new homes were built to a very basic standard. As per the authorities’ advice, buildings were equipped with corrugated galvanised iron (CGI) sheets for roofing instead of the previously common stone shingles. As a result of this change in construction methods, many Nepalis are now only shielded from the elements by a thin sheet of metal.
While CGI sheets are lighter and safer than traditional roofs in the event of an earthquake, they have little to offer in the face of summer heat, winter cold and the noise of torrential rain during the monsoon season. The noise is often so severe that it has a detrimental effect on the quality of sleep and education, and the lack of protection against temperature extremes is a risk to health. Furthermore, most Nepali homes rely on firewood for heating and cooking, meaning deforestation has become a significant problem.
Innovation stems from dissatisfaction
From an outsider’s perspective, these facts indicate that Nepal is facing numerous significant challenges, all of which could have adverse effects on the populace’s standard of living. However, when Curie first visited the country, she observed that the internal perspective differed from the external one.
“Nepalis are the happiest people ever!” she says. “People have a humble and grateful attitude to life, and they don’t like being stressed. Coupled with the belief that nothing is impossible in Nepal, there is a feeling that everything will be OK, but there is no rush to change the things that are not working. If I had just parachuted in with this project money and told people what to do, it would have been an easy way to alienate the locals.”
Aligning the two perspectives meant that Curie had to tread carefully and remember that the project should be done by the locals, for the locals, with the local waste. For the duration of the project, her role has been that of facilitator, lowering the threshold for local entrepreneurs to bring their ideas to fruition.
“We don’t want to give people fish: we want to learn how to fish together. We are trying to encourage innovative thinking, but innovation tends to come from a place of dissatisfaction. We don’t want to make people feel dissatisfied, but rather to see that with simple means, they can help themselves, their communities and the environment,” she adds.
From new ideas to local businesses
Each project in the Sustainable Manufacturing and Environmental Pollution Programme (SMEP) seeks to identify profitable, scalable and sustainable uses of environmental pollutants, tailored to the cultural and economic context. In Nepal, that means using plastic waste to create durable and practical building materials to lift the local standard of living, while limiting the environmental damage of plastic burning and littering.
In the very first stage of the project, Curie focused on building her network of collaborators and was glad to find a lot of interest in participating. Once it was established that the project had potential, the team had plastic-processing machines imported and installed, and they made plans for two competitive MAKEathons to take place at FabLab Nepal. The task for participating entrepreneurs: develop a product using existing technology to transform plastic waste into durable housing products for Nepali homes.
Contestants, a mix of local and international entrepreneurs, were encouraged to assess their ideas against three criteria. First, they had to ensure that the logistics of creating their chosen product would be manageable. That meant thinking about how to source the plastic, to ensure that the equipment needed for production was available, and that there would be a market for the finished product. Second, they were asked to think about durability to ensure a long-lasting second life for the plastic. And, third, they had to consider the extent to which the product would meet an existing critical need in their local community. A total of 26 local and global participants attended the first MAKEathon, which resulted in seven open-source innovations and three winners, who went on to receive systematic start-up training. In the second MAKEathon, 44 local participants from across Nepal attended, and out of 6 contestants another 3 winners were awarded the opportunity to receive training.
Then followed a process of business incubation, including prototyping, masterclasses and coaching, leading to the launch of six brand new businesses, serving their local communities using the local waste.
Green Decision Labs
Using discarded polypropylene plastic (PP), Green Decision Labs makes under-roof insulation wool, which improves thermal insulation temperature by up to 5 degrees. First, the raw materials are pelletised and converted into plastic wool using a Polyfloss machine, and then the wool is felted and compressed in a cold press machine. To enhance the fire resistance of the felt, a mud-soaked cotton fabric is added on top, inspired by the traditional wall-finishing method of Nepali homes. Finally, the felt is rolled up for ease of transport and use.
Geodome
Geodome produces easy-to-assemble disaster shelter units comprising a skeleton of interlocking plastic tubes and a plastic sheet to cover it. In the event of a major earthquake or flood, people may be advised to vacate their houses, even if they are safer than pre-2015 standards. Shelter units like the Geodome can serve as a safe temporary lodging in such cases.
Scavengers and PLASTICPeople Vietnam
Multi-layer plastic packaging like crisp packets can be hard to recycle, but Scavengers and PLASTICPeople Vietnam have found a way. Using a high-pressure hot press, they melt and combine the raw materials to make roofing sheets of greater thickness than the commonly used CGI sheets.
Paramendo
Different plastics are suited to different purposes, and Paramendo has set its focus on two kinds of polyethylene. They use LDPE (low-density polyethylene) to make thin roofing repair sheets that can be melted onto damaged parts of roofs, and HDPE (high-density polyethylene) to make beautiful marbled tiles for flooring.
Plastic Heart
Through the process of extrusion, Plastic Heart makes sturdy plastic beams for use in interiors and furniture.
Together, the six businesses provide a set of housing products with the potential to substantially improve living standards in Nepali communities at very low cost. The small-scale remanufacturing units in the villages reduce the transportation cost of housing materials that often increases the total cost threefold. Overall, the P2G project is expected to transform the country’s plastic waste into useful products, improve the air quality by ending plastic burning, and reduce reliance on firewood.
Impact Hub Kathmandu is the local management and implementation partner on the P2G project, and Padmakshi Rana, Executive Director and Co-Founder, is very pleased with the project’s progress to date.
“It’s been an incredible journey of learning, unlearning and relearning with the University of Cambridge team and the P2G entrepreneurs,” says Padmakshi. “Plastic waste is an ever-growing concern in Nepal. Through the P2G project, we have been able to provide a platform to the Nepali entrepreneurs for designing and developing community-based innovative solutions out of plastic waste, and resilient business models.”
Planting a seed
At the current stage of the project (mid-2024), with the new businesses up and running, Curie wants to spend more time in Nepal. In previous years she has spent less than half of her time there, but things are changing. Many smaller day-to-day decisions need to be made, especially about the challenges around scaling, but there are also bigger strategic questions to address about where the project is going and how it can inspire similar projects elsewhere. Each incubee has been awarded £800 for their activities from the SMEP project, which supports activities like travelling, raw material purchase and company registration fees. These investments help businesses to be financially and environmentally sustainable.
Looking ahead, Curie and the teams are working to ensure that market demand will sustain the new businesses. Because the Nepali market is import-heavy and price-sensitive, the P2G businesses have a competitive advantage over many competitors, whose transportation costs sometimes lead to a tripling of the final product price. This advantage, in addition to an innovation-focused mindset, puts the new businesses in a good position to meet current and future community needs in lasting and sustainable ways.
“P2G is about education and capacity building, and many of our learnings from Nepal are transferable to other locations with adverse environments. We hope that when this project comes to an end, we will have planted a seed of innovation culture that will flourish into the future,” Curie concludes.
