Wiki Mbili
In the beginning of the week, the building process of the shredder continued and the first part of the machine is allready finished with help of some of the employees. It was wonderfull to see how eager the employees were to help even if their English wasn't very good.
As we mentioned before, one of our aims is to use as many local materials as possible. So we started focussing on how local machines are build and whether we are able to use it as inspiration to broaden our western minds. There was immediatly one specific machine that can be found on every corner of the street and on every market: THE SUGAR CANE JUICE MACHINE! This is used to substract juice out of the sugar cane sticks by squeezing the sticks between two bars.
Some of them were driven by a very powerfull electric motor with a low speed, which is exactly what we need for our plastic shredder. Hopefully we will be going to the sugar cane machine producers next week to get informed on what they specifically use to build them and where they buy there parts.
Others were powered manually with human strength. This made us think because somethimes the power on Zanzibar just gets cut off by the government which slows down Chako's production. Therefore we are considering the option to use manpower instead of electricity or maybe we could build the machine in a way that both options are possible.
Tuesday we were going on a bottle collection tour with the manager and his team of the collection system. During the tour we drove to nine different places around Stone Town. Chako provides this free service for the hotels, restaurants and shops thus creates a win win situation for both parties. Since the current collection system of Chako is well organised, the plastic collection would be much more easier to facilitate as we can combine these two parts. Because of the bad road construction, it took some time to get to the first resort and therefore it is hard to be as efficient as you have mind here in Zanzibar. You have to keep in mind the local things that could slow down your work.
Later this week we started designing the framework of the machine too! Originally we were planning on using a metal frame as support but again the sugar cane juice machine popped up. Most of them are build on a cart which can be easily moved around. This would be great for Chako's workplace because they are very limited is space so whenever they wouldn't have to use it they would be able to easily move it to a corner for example.
With all these new thoughts we are very excited to visit the factory!
Meanwhile we have been in contact with the Public Relation team of our GoFundMe campaign to receive more media attention for our project. A journalist from AD Delft reached out to us and after that two articles were written.
On Saturday Chako participated in a fair at the International School of Zanzibar to help Chako. For this we made an invitation flyer that Christine would sent out to possible guests. It feels good when you are finished with your design and they would actually use it. At the fair we would help Chako setting up their stand and talking to possible customers. This was also an opportunity for us to see in which environment these children grow up and which facilities that the school offers.
As the last activity of the week we joined Christine on a trip to Kendwa where many large five star hotels are located. The aim of this journey was to look for new bottle collection partners. It is important to focus on these large resorts because they have a large impact concerning the waste they produce. The role of the hotel would be to collect the wine bottles and sort them into boxes so that they can easily picked up. In the future the same goes for plastic. This is a free service provided by Chako and its partners. This manner the resorts don't have to pay for a piece of land to dump their bottles and plastic. On one hand Chako receives resources and on the other hand the resorts are getting rid of their waste in a sustainable way and mutual benefit is created. It turned out to be a succesfull day! All the managers were very enthousiastic to start collecting the wine bottles and when our project evolves they would be interested in doing the same with plastic. Hopefully when we are at the end of our project, we will have an agreement with one of the resorts.