The Eco-Ring ♻️ Turning plastic waste into toilets 🚽
Say you have a candy wrapper in your pocket. What do you do with it?
Do you leave it in there, destined to tumble through the wash? Do you throw it in the trash? Or on the ground?
What if you could recycle it? What could it turn into?
Like most countries, Bangladesh is facing serious challenges dealing with plastic waste. In its capital city of Dhaka, only 37% of plastic waste gets recycled. In rural areas, that number’s even lower. A lot of it ends up polluting streets, rivers, and oceans.
Another challenge Bangladesh faces: almost half of people don’t have access to decent toilets of their own.
What do these two challenges have in common?
The answer is, the Eco-Ring — a toilet tank that’s made using a mix of recycled plastic and concrete.
Through the Polak Fund, the iDE community has been powering the Bangladesh team to figure out the perfect mix of recycled plastic and concrete to produce the Eco-Ring.
The team focused on difficult to recycle plastics, like shopping bags and candy wrappers. Recycling these plastics prevents them from going into landfills, rivers, and oceans. It also stops people from burning them for use as cooking fuel, which is a serious health risk.
At every stage of this project, the Bangladesh team worked with those who would be involved and benefit — like waste collectors, recyclers, toilet producers, and buyers.
Because donors like you gave the time, resources, and encouragement needed to work on this innovation, the team was able to find the perfect mix of cement and hard to recycle plastic.
The Eco-Ring is easy to produce, works well, and is similar in price to the all-cement version.
The Bangladesh team is excited for the future of the Eco-Ring. Their goals are to increase recycling and access to quality toilets throughout Bangladesh.
Thank you for powering innovations that tackle multiple challenges at once, like the Eco-Ring!
Want to power even more innovations? You can donate today to iDE Canada at idecanada.org/donate