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!

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Dung Beetle Project Director Jeffrey Barbee joins Steve Blair in Delta County, where they are lining up suppliers and possible sites to create the first Dung Beetle in the US. Steve is a marine biologist with a passion for removing plastic from the oceans, and he is helping kickstart our Dung Beetle technology rollout as the Managing Director of the Dung Beetle Project in Colorado. They are joined by videographer Peter Pawlowsky, who runs the Locksley Project  Peter travels the world sharing the stories of individuals who are making a difference. Watch his short film following the project below.

The Dung Beetle plans to be exhibiting its exciting innovative technology of turning plastic into fuel at the home of Alliance Earth in Colorado over the next year. Find out more!

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date: Monday 28th January
time: 16h30
place/venue: Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS)
University of Oxford
64 Banbury Road
Oxford
OX2 6PN

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Peter is the regional project coordinator for the marine plastics and coastal community initiative for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The visit was organized by Juliet Lyon, from ParCo  (Parceiros Comunitarios) and our very own beetles Ana Alecia Lyman and Lisa Chatnam.  Thanks ladies!

Juliet Lyon started ParCo as a community led development program in Vilankulo, Mozambique. The program empowers women and communities to help remove plastic from Mozambique’s beaches. We are exploring ways that ParCo and The Dung Beetle Project can work together to address the problems of energy security and plastic pollution. Keep up the great work Juliet!

IUCN is a potential partner for the dung beetle project and this was a good chance for Peter to see the technology first-hand and meet the crew who made it happen.   Peter loved the beetle and was particularly excited to see it unplugged from the mains power and running off of a generator directly from the produced gas.  Hopefully we will see Peter again soon, maybe to talk about ocean plastic pollution from our very own beetle stage.

Viva Dung beetles!

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All over the world, there has been an ongoing conversation about plastic, and what we can do to remove plastic waste. In some parts of the world, governments are banning single-use plastics, like plastic straws. Some companies are charging the consumer for the plastic that they use. There is, however, a new invention created here in South Africa that can eliminate plastic waste that can’t be recycled, but also turn it into liquid fuel.

The dung beetle insect in Africa is known for rolling up waste in their environment into a ball and storing it as food. In similar fashion, the Dung Beetle machine created has the same principle, to turn waste into something beneficial. The dung beetle machine is a huge breakthrough when dealing with the plastic waste issue. Watch this short video clip on the CGTN Dung Beetle re-port(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2kV-uj1atc) and its multiple benefits.

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The UN Environmental Programme says that around 8 Mt of plastic waste ends up in the world’s oceans each year. That’s the equivalent of a garbage truck full of plastic being dumped into the ocean every minute.

At the same time, sub-Saharan Africa is facing wood fuel crisis with massive environmental consequences, as the most dominant energy form for cooking and energy for many communities remains wood.

The Dung Beetle Project aims to address these and other challenges in a fun and innovative way using art, education, and technology that has existed for almost 100 years. The solution – a plastic gasification system covered by a steel structure in the form of a dung beetle – uses pyrolysis to heat plastic into a gas and then condense it back into usable fuels.

“The Dung Beetle is really just a package to deliver what is essentially one of many solutions to a planetary crisis we face with the amount of plastics in our environment,” notes Jeffrey Barbee, environmental journalist, and director of Alliance Earth.

“The reason we packaged this solution as a dung beetle is because not only are dung beetles rather fabulous, but they do the work that most organisms overlook as probably beneath them. They take waste and turn it into something useful, which is what our Dung Beetle does. “If you think about it, people have made this system before; what we created here, we literally learned from YouTube – we have not done anything new, this type of technology has been around for at least 100 years. What we looking at here is adapting one solution to the plastic problem into a communications platform that is fun, fiery and hopefully unforgettable,” he explains.

Driving climate change and environmental education

The project has become a centrepiece for climate change and environmental education and has garnered much attention since its debut at the AfrikaBurn arts festival in the Karoo earlier this year. The Dung Beetle was mounted on a trailer, along with a stage that allowed for a production that included live performances by artists, as well as talks and tours of the gasification technology.

“We chose to present this project as art because art is communicative in so many ways. When you’re talking about environmental education, it’s really important to engage people at many different levels.

“Through the project, we are driving not only information about how the Dung Beetle works but solutions about things like climate-smart agriculture and agroforestry solutions. We need to continue to adapt to such solutions in the world, which we are changing through pollution and greenhouse gases.”

As the Beetle travels around the country, it uses the syngas it creates to power the lights and speakers for the roadshow. The syngas also fuels two torches that burn and shoot flames 2 m into the air out of the Beetle. The truck towing it is also powered using low-emission biodiesel.

Tackling pollution on all fronts

Barbee notes that South African townships are plagued by a pollution problem on multiple levels. “Many people eat lunch at street-side cafes, many of which use just a three stone wood fire. Sometimes they even use anthracite coal for cooking food.

“These things already have a heavy footprint problem but when you see the kind of air pollution that you see in South Africa’s townships, particularly in the winter time, with people using whatever forms of energy they can to cook with, it’s a no-brainer that a heat system with no release of hydrocarbons into the environment would be extremely beneficial.

“So, through our system, we are able to turn a local plastic problem into a local cooking solution, by changing plastics into usable fuels that have very little or no ecological footprint beyond cleaning up the plastic in the environment.”

Empowering Environmentalism

Looking ahead, Barbee notes that Alliance Earth will continue to use the Dung Beetle Project as an educational art platform and there are plans to open a company that will manufacture these systems to empower the local community. “We would like to see people using this technology much more broadly because our main mission at the Dung Beetle Project is to see plastics removed from the environment in an ecologically safe way. Now, because we’ve had such a reaction worldwide, people want these systems for themselves, and we are looking at starting a separate project to build these systems.”

According to Barbee, the new project will be based in the south of Johannesburg and will retrain people who have been put out of work by the mining industry to build Dung Beetles. “The aim is to create an alternative energy stream market that essentially monetises these types of systems and puts that energy and money into the hands of small-scale entrepreneurs in Southern Africa. The aim is to have a much larger ecological impact in terms of pulling plastic out of the environment,” he says. “The reason we are opting to lease and not sell them is so that we ensure that we hold on to the ability to innovate and make these systems cleaner, better, more efficient and more successful at removing plastic from the environment,” Barbee concludes.

A basic open-source model registered with a creative commons licence will be available once the design for the Dung Beetle has been finalised. Alliance Earth will share it with like-minded organisations, groups, and individuals under that license, at that everyone can benefit from this important technology

This article written by Liesl Frankson first appeared in ReSource in August 2018.

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We are also continuing to reach out to various stakeholders and players in the waste plastic and recycling industries here in South Africa and the region. The outpouring of interest has been amazing!

Check out our not-so-poopy new video below:

Here in South Africa only about 20% of all the 1.3 billion kilograms of plastic (yes you read that right) produced, is recycled. We are trying to target the 80% that isn’t so that we can work side by side with those already invested in re-using waste plastic. The sad fact is that there is plenty of waste plastic to go around, but that also means that there is a lot of potential to grow this industry.

So, of course, our small team of innovators has been wracking our brains trying to come up with some way to fund all of this expensive research and development. Since we aim to get our basic design out into the open source world, we have reached out to various international platforms in order to best understand how to safely release our system and how we can make sure that it gets used as widely as possible.

For now, we are coasting a bit, making connections and getting ready to drive forward with more practical financial solutions so we can keep the ideas and solutions flowing. In the meantime, we will continue to innovate and up-skill our fabrication team, and we will keep you all abreast of events from this page and our upcoming Beetle Newsletter.

Feel free to drop us some loose change if you feel like supporting our crowd-funding platform here in its infancy. We will also be rolling out many more cool ideas for crowd-involvement because we firmly believe that to deal with this problem we are all going to need to be as engaged as possible. There will be many ways to get involved, so stay tuned, and share our project widely. That helps a lot!

Check out these images of our new batch machine, with Judith Biti and our chief welder Marshal Matsveru. Judith is the director of The AWN Recycling Centers in Johannesburg. She has been working with us to make sure our designs are best suited to deal with the waste plastic streams that she cannot re-use. Thanks, Judith!

Jeffrey Barbee
The Dung Beetle Project Director

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