Workers of the Dung Beetle Project busy recycling materials.

How the Dung Beetle Project and ScarabTECH are fighting plastic pollution.

It’s official! This week our industrial beetle partner and for-profit offshoot ScarabTECH took delivery of our first commercial machine designed by our resident genius Pierre (Pops) Pretorius and co-developed by ScarabTECH!

When launching our Dung Beetle Project community stage that runs on plastic almost two years ago, we never imagined we would be building big machines and rolling out projects like our new offshoot ScarabTECH. With a lot of help and lots of hard work by our team, ScarabTECH moved into its new premises in the south of Johannesburg, South Africa this week.

From this base we will continue innovating and assembling our first South African-made beetle machines that can transform residential and industrial waste-plastic into energy. After that, we will be focusing our development on scaling up production of our machines on other continents so that people around the world can benefit from this useful technology.

The first commercial machine, which weighs about two tonnes, was dropped off at the ScarabTECH research and development factory from our original build site by a five-ton truck and crane system. The ability for these machines to be “plonked” down and working quickly is one of the things that sets ScarabTECH apart from its competitors. Machines that can process between 100 and 1000 Kgs of plastic a day generally take months (if not years) to build and assemble, and cost around three times more than ours. ScarabTECH will focus on production and innovation, while the Dung Beetle Project aims to bring these machines to where the plastic crisis is most acute, on beaches, in cities, and wherever some of the 400 million tons of plastic a year that humans create is dumped.

Bringing this technology to the world in a cheaper, more robust and more usable manner is one way to start making a real difference in reducing the amount of un-recycled plastic around the globe.

We know this is just a small step on the road to a plastic-free future for humanity, but for our team of committed beetles it was a great week to see lots of hard work finally coming together. We are excited to also announce the launch of the ScarabTECH website: www.scarabtech.com
The website answers your most pertinent questions and is available for everyone to share.
It’s an exciting time, but it will take all of us to fight the problem of single-use plastics.

If you want to understand more about pyrolysis technology and how it can help reduce the plastic pollution problem, you can read more at this useful link from Chemical and Engineering News.

Watch this space for more upcoming news and places where you can visit our new generation of working beetle machines, from beaches to recycling centres near you!