a three-year expedition to train in plastic recycling around the world

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three years for train people who are victims of plastic pollution around the world. The NGO Plastic Odyssey begins an expedition on Saturday, October 1 from Marseille to three continents and thirty countries, aboard an experimental ship equipped with a micro-recycling plant. The objective is to encourage entrepreneurs to embark on the activity of waste recovery.

From the outside, the forty-meter-long boat with its white and blue hull looks quite classic. It’s when you get on board that you come across somewhat special machines. “At the back of the boat, we have almost 200 square meters of workshop”, explains Simon Bernard, one of the founders of the NGO. “With different machines to grind waste to make useful objects. It can be tiles for the roofs of houses or pipes for sewage pipes”, exposes the thirty-something, a graduate of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure Maritime de Marseille.

The idea is to make this boat a demonstrator of solutions, by sharing know-how for free. First stopover planned in Beirut, Lebanon. Egypt, Morocco and Guinea will follow. “What we are targeting is really the thirty countries that have the most problems today with this pollution, which suffer from this plastic pollution. Many in Africa, Southeast Asia and South America” , affirms Simon Bernard.

“So in the end we are not too interested in rich countries, but we are really interested in countries under constraint which are crumbling under plastic waste. But where precisely, this waste can become a resource because there are plenty of needs and that there are economic models that can work locally”, he explains. There is therefore also a whole training work on site, according to Alexandre Dechelotte, co-founder of Plastic Odyssey. “We train entrepreneurs who we select at each stopover, but it is not a transmission of information from countries in the North to countries in the South. It is an exchange”.

The team also learns technologies that have been thought about for years. They have, for example, replicated on board a crusher discovered in Alexandria, Egypt.

“The objective is to share, to create a network for sharing these good technical solutions and data. So we have plans that are available in open source. In three clicks, on the website, you can download the plans of the machines.”

Alexandre Dechelotte, co-founder of Plastic Odyssey

at franceinfo

Another objective: to be able to manufacture but also repair locally. “These are not consumer machines. We are not going to put this in everyone’s living room to create recycling micro-factories, but we want to make them accessible”, temperate Alexandre Dechelotte. “There is no question of applying for patents and then claiming any right on one of the machines. Our objective is that this be deployed as much as possible throughout the world during the expedition”.

With a budget of ten million euros over three years, largely financed by private companies, the NGO hopes to train 300 professionals to create micro-factories for recycling during the expedition.

“Plastic waste can become a resource”: report by Hugo Charpentier

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