SAN CARLOS CITY, Pangasinan — The city government here has assembled a machine that will turn plastic waste, such as candy wrappers, shampoo sachets, and junk food containers, into armchairs.
“We know that candy wrappers, shampoo sachets and other plastic wastes take a hundred years to decompose, causing problems to our drainage systems, that is why we came up with this project in order to recycle these materials,” Mayor Joseres Resuello said in an interview on Friday.
The equipment can make one plastic armchair out of every 24 kg. of soft plastic waste, hence, the city government partnered with the Department of Education to provide the plastic raw materials, he said.
Soft plastics are any plastic that can be easily broken or crushed by hands.
“The schools will have one armchair for every 30 kg. of plastic they provide. Of course, there are excesses to the required kilograms of plastic. These will be used to make more armchairs,” Resuello said.
He said one of the members of the Filipino Inventors Society (FIS), who hails from Bugallon town, assembled the machine, which is a prototype of the equipment used by the plant of Senator Cynthia Villar in Las Piñas, that will enable them to accomplish the project.
“Felipe Pamintuan, a barangay captain in Bugallon and member of the FIS, copied the specifications of the equipment and made it into a machine shop here. We spent around PHP1.9 million for it but we were able to save since it costs around PHP2.5 to PHP3 million in the market, aside from the fact that is locally made by our provincemate,” the mayor said.
Resuello said the training for the use of the equipment will start as soon as Villar turns over the armchair mold that they use.
“We are waiting for the mold. Maybe it is still being done. We will just wait in order to save PHP1.5 million, which is the cost of the mold,” he added. (Hilda Austria/PNA)
