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The Centre for Regenerative Design and Collaboration (CRDC) South Africa has been rewarded for their groundbreaking new concrete modifier made from mixed plastic waste.
The Centre for Regenerative Design and Collaboration (CRDC) South Africa has been rewarded for their groundbreaking new concrete modifier made from mixed plastic waste.
Harmful plastic nurdles find pride of place in building industry One company has decided to make building material out of tiny plastic pellets washing up along SA’s coastline 28 January 2021 - 20:20 By Mluleki Mdletshe
A silver lining has emerged from an environmental disaster that struck Cape Town last year when a ship lost a container with a massive consignment of tiny plastic pellets.
The Centre for Regenerative Design and Collaboration decided the pellets, known as nurdles, which have beached along parts of SA’s coastline, must not end up in landfill sites.
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Buggy sucks up nasty nurdles on beaches
It was after a beach clean-up in Cape Town early last year that an exasperated Chris Krauss phoned his father-in-law, Luigi Faccio. Krauss and other members of the #SeaTheBiggerPicture, an ocean conservation initiative, were frustrated by trying to remove microplastics nurdles by hand. The lentil-size plastic particles spread insidiously across beaches.
“Chris said to me: ‘Listen, can’t we do something, try to organise a vacuum, that we can clean the beaches with?’ ” recalls Faccio.
Faccio, who runs Matriarch Generic Engineering in Germiston, was intrigued. Together with the #SeaTheBiggerPicture team, his firm developed the Enviro Buggy, a four-wheeled, self-propelled stainless steel and aluminium vacuum cleaner that sucks up microplastics on beaches.