3D printing could help combat Samoa waste

Transcript

A New Zealand design student is hoping to utilise 3D printing to help Samoa combat its problem with plastic waste.

Lionel Taito-Matamua, who studies design at Wellington's Victoria University, says when he attended his grandmother's funeral in Samoa he was shocked to see the sheer volume of waste in the country.

He says that inspired him to devote his Master's thesis to try and find a way to help Samoa make use of its waste plastic, by turning it into something useful and helping the environment.

He told Jamie Tahana that can be done with 3D printing.

LIONEL TAITO-MATAMUA: In terms of recycling programmes there's nothing happening at the moment. Everything's just collected and either burned, buried, sometimes ends up in rivers and lakes, or the other one is that it just ends up in the landfill.  

JAMIE TAHANA: This inspired you for your Master's thesis. So what was that about?

LT-M: For the past five years I've been studying design - focussing on industrial design. So for my industrial design thesis topic I wanted to combine the two, so I felt that the opportunity to incorporate 3D printing and using that for the community in Samoa could be a good opportunity. And then looking at the materials we use in 3D printing; a lot of materials for basic 3D printing uses just standard plastics - ABS, PLA. It sort of just came to me that why can't we just get some waste plastics and potentially transform that into material we can 3D print with.  

JT: So the idea is to turn this waste plastic into some cups, or cutlery or something?

LT-M: Yeah, yep. So the whole process is, you know, you collect the material - so creating a recycling system, per se -, shredding it up into little particles, and then transforming that into filament which is, you could say, the 'ink' they use for 3D printers. It's basically a reel of plastic - it sort of looks like fishing line. So, transforming waste plastic into that stuff and then using that material to create stuff that could benefit the communities.

JT: Did you go into how viable it would be for communities in Samoa? Would it be something quite easy for them to adapt to or pick up?

LT-M: Some of the people that I talked to they were looking forward to it if it was to be brought in because, you know, this technology isn't one of those ones that is easily accessible in Samoa, or affordable for locals. But in terms of implementation artists were keen to jump on board, a few environmental companies showed an interest, we just had to create a good amount of evidence in terms of how beneficial it could be. But in terms of just the people that we talked to, yeah a lot of interest was gained so a lot of the thesis was just focussing on what areas could this 3D printing benefit in Samoa? So we found that the education system could benefit from 3D printing quite a bit in terms of Pacific Island students being kinesthetic learners. So having something to touch in front of them which is three dimensional instead of just a drawing on whiteboard or blackboard could benefit kids in terms of learning. So that was one area we looked, but probably one of the most enjoyable ones that we came up with was incorporating it into the tourism industry, because of how Samoa gets a lot of tourists coming in during the summer the opportunity to create souvenirs, you could say, that tourists could take back with them made of this recycled material the tourists were using. Because you know there's a lot of bottled water in Samoa because the water quality isn't that great, so because of that we found another good opportunity in that.

Lionel Taito-Matamua's project has made him one of six finalists in two categories at the New Zealand Innovators Awards.