You can do your part first by REDUCING your plastic use like this:

1. Use cloth bags for shopping, plastic shopping bags are yuck.
2. Don’t bag your fruit and veggies in the shop, use a reusable bag or just take it home naked!
3. Don’t use cling wrap! Reuse hard plastic or ceramic bowls for leftovers.
4. Pack your lunch in reusable containers and bags.
5. Chewing gum is made from plastic, yuck! It’s best to just whistle.
6. If you see too much plastic packaging at the supermarket, ask the manager to use less.
7. Never buy bottles of water or a cool drink, use a glass or steel water bottle instead.

If we can REUSE plastic, even once, then that stops more from being made!

1. Reuse plastic yogurt tubs that are marked plastic number 5, and pack your lunch in there!
2. Clean plastic ziplock bags, you can reuse these like ten times!
3. Repurpose plastic bottles into planters, pencil cases or really anything.
4. Hang two litre bottles on your wall for a vertical garden.
5. Share this link with your teachers and friends, learn more!

RECYCLE!

1. Get to know your plastic numbers through our helpful “What The Plastic?” Guide.
2. Put your plastic in a separate bin from your glass and metal.
3. If you clean your plastic, it is MUCH more likely to be recycled.
4. Plastic must be dry, this also stops it from stinking….ewwwww.

The post How can “RRR” revolutionize the plastic pollution problem? appeared first on The Dung Beetle Project.

As part of the massive National School of the Arts festival, the students are helping share the message of reduce, reuse and recycle plastic as well as the universal message of The Dung Beetle Project. The Dung Beetle Project is known for its work in sharing education on how we can save the planet by being more environmentally minded. Not only is The Beetle a piece of art, but it also creates fuel from plastic and we could all do better finding similar ways of helping the planet and each other.

We are sharing this message of hope that together we can do something about the epidemic of plastic pollution.

The Dung Beetle Project fires up the start of the festival day with a performance & eco-demonstration on the NSA field at 8am with another performance at 12 noon. There is no capacity limit but we do advise you to get some tickets and join the festival all day.

Even your friends will say “We want to go see the Dung Beetle” when you tell them about this great initiative.

Don’t be toxic, be awesome! If you missed the show on Wednesday 4 March or Thursday 5 March, you can still catch it on Friday 6 March.

Info on bookings here. Come join us or follow us on social media.

Date : 5 and 6 March 2020
Time : 8am and 12pm
Venue : National School of the Arts

The post The Dung Beetle Project and their epic eco-demonstration at the National School of the Arts festival appeared first on The Dung Beetle Project.

Mike Jervis, one of the founders of the Dung Beetle Project and wife Laura sent their six – year-old Erin to this sprawling re-purposed suburban house under the trees of Johannesburg’s Greenside area.

The kids gathered around the Dung Beetle stage to eagerly learn from Mike about how they could be Beetle helpers, collecting the right plastic at home so it doesn’t end up polluting the environment. “The Beetle eats plastic numbers 2, 4, 5 and 6.” Mike explained by slowly showing the numbers on his hands and had the kids repeat after him. “I like the Beetle because it chews plastic”, Erin stated excitedly before running off with her friends.

The school uses the Reggio Emilia-inspired approach to teach kids aged 2-6 years old. According to the Scots College in Sydney Australia, the teaching system “is an innovative and inspiring approach to early childhood education, which values the child as strong, capable and resilient; rich with wonder and knowledge.” This system taps into the innate curiosity of children and drives a hands-on approach to learn through questioning and experience.

At Small World kids do lots of different activities, like drawing pictures to show how trees talk to each other or even pictures of them talking to nature directly.  They also learn to speak some of the twelve official languages in this country of 45 million people, all while helping develop their own curriculum in their own language.

Circled around the beetle, the kids were rapt by how they could be part of the plastic pollution solution by becoming aware of the ways that plastic could either be reused or given a suitable end in the belly of our recycled steel machine.

The following day, some of the kids dragged their parents to our event on the streets of Johannesburg’s arty Melville area, where the stage had been set up for the Afrikaburn-supported Streetopia event. In their hands were bags of plastic, dug out of their own trash, ready to feed the Beetle. The plastic they brought? Numbers 2, 4, 5 and 6.

Learn more about Small World school here and the types of plastic eaten by the Beetle in our handy “What The Plastic?” guide. Find the guide here.

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2. Planting trees and turning plastic into fuel

“Eco-Rangers is a club in my school where we plant and water stuff. We talk about litter and things that keep the environment clean and the things that make the environment dirty like plastic and polystyrene. The Dung Beetle Project can melt the plastic and turn it into fuel. If we could do this everywhere it could save the environment.”

Yashna, Durban, South Africa, Treetops Eco-School

3. Waste turned into art

“We colour fish on a piece of paper and then our teacher cuts the plastic fish out for us from a plastic bottle. We draw dots and stripes with a marker and then paint it. We are recycling plastic into art.”

Simmy Matha, Durban, South Africa, Treetops Eco-School

4. Recycling saves the environment

“I think the Dung Beetle is cool and nice because it looks cool… I like bugs… I think recycling saves the environment.”

Issy Haarof, Durban, South Africa, Treetops Eco-School

5. Cleaning and spreading word

“The Dung Beetle is turning plastic into flames and energy… we can all help the Dung Beetle by recycling, picking up litter and telling people how to do it. We joined the International Beach Clean-up Day and cleaned up plastic on the beach using a sieve.”

Oliver Kidson, Durban, South Africa, Treetops Eco-School

The Dung Beetle Project Schools Outreach Initiative strives to spread the word of environmental conservation and educates about the importance of recycling and renewable energy. Education about the environment should start early and you can find out more about what the Dung Beetle Project does here.

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If you surf, you’ll have noticed all the crap washing up on the beach, most of it plastic. And if you’ve been surfing for a long time, you’ll have noted that it’s getting worse, much worse. Surfers are on the frontline of the plastic pollution problem. It is, fundamentally, our issue. At the heart of this crisis, is the ‘design-flaw’ of single-use plastic. Cheap, disposable packaging that serves a brief purpose and then remains in the environment for several thousand years. So while the race is on to find and implement bio-degradable alternatives and ban single-use plastics, the big question remains what to do with all the plastic currently in the environment? Not to mention all the new plastic that will be produced until single-use plastics are banned and the alternatives become viable. Ripple dissolve to AfrikaBurn. Amongst the doef-doef of bass and the whirl of spandex and leathered middle-aged ravers, in the desert, a group of friends; Pops Pretorius, Jeff Barbee, Simon Davis, Mike Jervis and Dave Terblanche (Simon is the brother of Zigzag’s publisher) got together with the intention of tackling the planet’s plastic pollution problem effectively. And in amongst all the gifting and the back rubs, they came up with something that looks very much like a viable solution. Enter the Dung Beetle! Pierre ‘Pops’ Pretorius is a bit of a wizard; an engineer, set-builder and prop designer who built the mothership for the epic South African sci-fi District 9. He was also running a diesel generator on his farm in Limpopo from a simple pyrolysis prototype he built that turns plastic waste into fuel. Jeff Barbee saw the rig, it blew his mind and set the wheels in motion. Jeff is an environmental journalist who runs Alliance Earth, an NPO that specialises in environmental and scientific reporting. “When I saw it working, I thought wow this would make a really good project to take to AfrikaBurn,” Jeff explains. “The festival generally brings in 13 000 people. So really it was an amazing space for us to showcase the technology. We sat down at the fire and decided to build the machine as a sculpture. An art vehicle, to show people what can happen on a bigger scale. We chose the Dung Beetle as a symbol because, in ancient Egypt, the scarab pushes the sun god, Ra, the ball of fire, across the sky. So it’s a symbol of rebirth, renewable hope if you will. This is something we don’t have in the plastic crisis… hope.” So how does it work? “First, you have to understand that plastic has double the energy density of coal.” Explains Jeff. Pyrolysis is the thermal decomposition of materials, like plastic at elevated temperatures in an inert atmosphere. “It changes the plastic through a system like distillation. You essentially boil it off.” What comes out of the Dung Beetle is a variety of fuels ranging from gas to diesel, paraffin and even wax – all of it useful but most importantly, valuable. “What we want to do is remove plastic from the environment and create an economy to do so.”

Dung Beetle pyrolysis machines are small scale, the vision is that every local garbage dump and recycling centre can have one generating fuel that is either used to run a generator that plugs straight back into the grid or sold as diesel, paraffin, etc. Thereby making plastic waste more valuable and supporting informal waste-pickers and recyclers. But if this is such a big innovation, why haven’t we heard about it before? “Well the tech is not new,” says Jeff. “The taxis in Paris during World War Two used pyrolysis to generate gasses that they could put straight back into the carburettor and drive around. One of the reasons why this tech has not become super widespread is that we just didn’t have a big use for it back then. The plastic crisis is relatively new. So now, recycling and the industry around it has created the market gap for pyrolysis to come into its own.” The real innovation is in the size scale of the Dung Beetle as a local solution. As plastic waste generally takes up a lot of space, it’s hard to transport in great volumes. You end up using more fuel getting the shipment to a pyrolysis machine than the shipment would yield. “The exciting thing about this is that our systems are portable so you can take it right to where the plastic is, negating the need to transport it. So the machine runs in the most optimum way closest to the plastic.” Imagine a bunch of these machines at municipal dumps, with people literally mining the dump for waste plastic and getting paid for their efforts. In many ways, the Dung Beetle is the definition of disruptive technology. Historically, the energy space is dominated by big corporations, state-owned utilities like Eskom and the government. “What it does is democratise the value of plastic on the ground in our environments in a way that incentivises local communities suffering from energy poverty to remove plastic from their environment and solve energy poverty at the same time.” And we don’t need to remind you, that plastic is a big, big problem. “There’s 400 million tons of plastic produced each year and only about 8-12% of that is recycled. So recycling, although valuable, is also part of the problem due to the fact that it makes people feel like they are doing something.” Jeff’s on a roll now. “Did you know that recycling in the US gets shipped off to China. And last year China stopped taking it. So what happened was those ships of trash were sent packing to Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia. Those are the three most significant contributors to the Pacific and Indian Ocean garbage patches in the world. So people in the first world think they are recycling but in actual fact have been contributing to the problem. The people sorting the plastic in those three aforementioned countries are doing so adjacent to major waterways. When monsoon rain events hit those regions, all that plastic waste is sent out to sea via these river systems. This is what happens with the Umgeni River every year. So poor regulation of the recycling industry is a major problem. All they do is pick through the waste, pull out the expensive bits and then let everything else just sit on the ground.

“What’s fascinating about the technology we employ,” Jeff smiles, “is that as people start to value all plastic, it’s much less likely for them to throw that into the environment.” But won’t creating a value chain for waste plastic give the plastic producers a free pass and slow down the uptake of biodegradable alternatives? “Hell no!” Says Jeff. “We imagine that single-use plastics will be outlawed altogether. People who are impacted by plastic, don’t want to live with it. There are 50 billion tons of plastic made since 1955, just sitting out there. None of that has been changed into anything else but more plastic. Even the bits that have been recycled have been turned into more plastic. This is not a problem that is going to go away anytime soon. And we’re also just starting to discover that plastic is cancer-causing, it is an endocrine disruptor. We cannot have it in our environment. The worm is turning on this. There’s a political change in the air.” There’s no future in this business! “50 billion tons of plastic waste is just sitting in the environment, that’s trillions of dollars if you could recycle all of that into fuel. It’s BIG money. If there is gonna be any future at all, it’s gonna have to be a future where fossil fuels are much more highly regulated than they are right now. We want to be in a position where we are removing plastic from the environment, making it safe and not contributing to climate change. The fuel and the gas that we generate are far less polluting than regular fossil fuels. But they also offset the production of that same fuel coming out of the ground. A litre of fuel at the pump represents a whole chain to get it there from crude oil. All of it being burnt and released into the atmosphere. Our system bypasses that and creates an opportunity to drive the revenue of that plastic away from the oil majors and into the hands of local communities dealing with the plastic crisis right now. “Man, you know how bad it is.” Jeff looks up. “The plastic pollution crisis is so profoundly disturbing and the more you know about it, the more disturbing it becomes. The least we can do is focus our energies and try and do something positive about this crisis. Turn the problem on its head and make a difference. We can’t sit back, we can only fix this together.”

We think Jeff could not have stated it any better. Making a difference and working together is what The Dung Beetle Project is all about. If you’d like to make a difference, partner with us in our outreach programme or help donate to our cause. Or simply sign up to our newsletter to keep informed on The Dung Beetle’s journey to saving to the planet!

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We facilitated a talk by Manape Shogole from the African Reclaimers Association, who is helping organize the informal waste picker groups around Johannesburg – bringing dignity and community support to the people working to keep our communities cleaner through small-scale recycling.

Paul Boyter on drums helped set the pace in the afternoon after the Dung Beetle crew did a short Q&A around their plastics-to-fuel, while Andrew the DJ spun vinyl.

Special thanks to Thandi O’Hagan and Natasha Davern who curated the stage and brought so many great vibes together, as well as everyone who came to participate, turn up, paint, weave memories and enjoy this fun and free chance to take back the city for our community.

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As a non-profit, community-based event, Streetopia Jozi is totally free and open for anyone to attend and enjoy. The streets will be filled with art, sculpture, music, market stalls and is a community and family affair. With it also being a space to highlight causes and social activism, The Dung Beetle Project will discuss the plastic problem and display our contemporary solution.

For more information about the event, visit the Streetopia Jozi website or Facebook page.

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The Camilla Plastic Ocean Plan incorporates science, art, and technology to change the conversation about plastic from one of despair to hope. The Film University of Babelsberg brought together thinkers, artists, and visual storytellers to explore ways we can change the conversation around plastic, and asked Dung Beetle Project Director Jeffrey Barbee to present on the value of art in science communication. Our message of hope, shared from our powered by plastic art stage, helps people everywhere see plastic differently and it was exciting to discover from the other presenters how people around the world are finding new ways to deal with plastic waste and create a new future. Discover more from our latest story on Alliance Earth’s website, the Dung Beetle Project’s parent organization.

To keep updated on our The Dung Beetle Project, subscribe to our newsletter or to support our initiative, donate here.

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Atlas of the Future is an online platform showcasing profiles of people and projects working to create a better world. Their mission is “democratising the future by speaking human” and features thousands of projects from science and technology, education, energy, agriculture, urbanism, and politics.

The projects chosen are real and innovative, with long-term vision and commitment to a lasting positive impact. There are four criteria to meet in order for a project to be featured. These include:

1. The project is real and currently happening.
2. The project is innovative. It brings a creative element or unique contribution to solving the
   challenges facing humanity.
3. The project is created with long-term vision and dedication to the future.
4. The project is committed to a lasting positive impact.

Atlas of the Future felt so strongly about our Dung Beetle Project and felt we met all the criteria to feature us on their website. You can read about it on the Atlas of the future page.

To keep up to date with what’s happening with the project find out more on the Dung Beetle Project page or sign up to our newsletter.

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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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