Filipino engineer discovers a new way to recycle plastic and turns it into colorful school furniture

Winchester Lemen is a Filipino engineer who founded his own company, Envirotech Waste Recycling (Envirotech Waste Recycling) and is transforming what would otherwise be plastic and polluting waste into school chairs. It all started when a customer visited his recycling plant and asked if Winchester would be able to do something with plastic, which led the engineer to create chairs for schools.

O awesome.club wants to share with you this story that offers a little hope in the face of the serious environmental crisis the Earth is going through.

In 2010, Winchester founded the aforementioned Envirotech Waste Recycling after leaving a job at a company linked to banana cultivation, where he worked recycling plastic bags used in cultivation. “I thought, well, let’s try…let’s work with these materials that nobody needs,” he said in an interview.

Assembly of school chairs, Philippines.

A report by the NGO GAIA explains that Filipinos “use more than 163 million plastic bag packaging, 48 million shopping bags and 45 million thin film paper per day”. Fortunately, the solution to this problem was closer than they thought, and thus came the system that collects, dismantles, cleans, melts, molds, assembles, sands and paints this material, which takes the form of furniture for schools.

On the left, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte with Winchester Lemen

The local government created a green fund to finance the project, which guarantees financial sustainability, providing security for Lemen to produce high-end chairs, with a 20-year warranty. “A school seat is made up of 30 kilograms of plastic, the equivalent of 10,000 candy wrappers or 300 bottles of mineral water,” he explains.

The image shows 44 chairs made from plastic waste and assembled for a school. Thanks to this work, around 44 trees were preserved.

Tourists visit the factory where chairs are manufactured

There are 7 types of plastic and those who recycle must melt each one separately. However, Lemen figured out how to mix them all up, something that seemed impossible.

“I thought of this to start reducing the amount of plastic waste in our country. The company wants to help,” said the engineer, who is already working on other types of chairs to be installed in parks or public spaces in his city, Davao, in the south of the country.

After 8 years, Lemen knows that there is still a lot to be done, as gathering all the waste and keeping it off the beaches, rivers and forests seems impossible given the current levels of pollution around the world. In any case, he is a pioneer in the environmental fight in his country and in his community and that is why he deserves to be applauded.

What did you think of this engineer’s work? Do you know of any other stories where recycling was used to benefit a community? Leave your opinion in the comments section!