Local Enterprise, Purpose Plastics Creates Beautiful Homeware & Fashion Items From Recycled Plastics

By Charmaine Shaharin  •  16 Aug 2021 in JUICE ♥

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Plastics are so prevalent that it has come to a point where you’re bound to find bits and pieces of it anywhere you go. It doesn’t get any better locally, especially, with Malaysia having a track record of being the world’s largest importer of plastic waste since 2017. I mean, even Coldplay recently sponsored a watercraft to remove plastic waste, mainly tapau-containers, from our rivers.

It’s dire to know that if we don’t act now to reduce plastic waste, our health and environment will suffer from detrimental effects.

Luckily, local green enterprise, Purpose Plastics recognised this issue and is dedicated to repurposing plastic waste – converting them into sustainable homeware and fashion accessory items.

The brain behind this initiative is Abe, Head of R&D at a syngas department and her team of engineers and consultants

When asked about what sparked her interest in repurposing plastic waste, she explained that it had all started during MCO when she finally realised how much single-use plastic she was consuming alone.

“Imagine, 30 million people in Malaysia doing the exact same thing. I was also getting annoyed how there was minimal coverage on this and decided to go on YouTube to find solutions there and try it out myself,” she said.

 

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Since then, Abe and Purpose Plastics’ goal has been to make Malaysia a cleaner place. They aim to recycle 1 tonne of plastic waste per month.

She explained that in order to make the homeware items, the plastics that are collected from family, friends, plastic factories and recycling centres as well as old packaging from food industries, will go through a process called shredding and crushing.

 

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“There are no requirements when doing this process, the only thing that we have to keep an eye for is the machines. If it’s a bigger volume, then we would need a bigger machine,” she said.

“Although the process doesn’t take long, it’s still tardy as we would have to separate the plastics into their type, as some manufactures do not stamp their plastics. Later on, we separate them by colours too after they go through a general cleaning process.

 

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Once the scraps of plastics have been separated and cleaned, Abe and her team will then combine the recycled HDPE/PET/PP plastic waste with resin for the specific shape to be moulded.

” Throughout our experiments with different components, we found out that epoxy resin does a good job as a shape holder, gap-filler and they’re highly versatile and extremely strong. This way, we don’t melt any plastic, exude no toxic fumes and we can recycle ANY type of plastic,” she said.

The products featured on Purpose Plastics’ website include coasters, hair clips, Chinese chess sets, candle holders and a figurine.

They plan to release new products every 2 weeks now, and venture into making furniture and merge plastic waste into infrastructures such as roads and bricks in the near future.