Imagine taking the plastic bottle you just drank out of and turning it into a keychain - even if it was a bottle of "badman".
That's what villagers and tourists in Placencia will be able to do with the Be Blue" organization. The group has designed a machine that recycles discarded plastic. We might mention here that the machine itself is made from recycled plastic!
That is then connected to a 3D printer that upcycles the plastic trash and turns them into little pieces of plastic treasure.
And they've gifted it to the village council so that tourists can take home more than just pictures.
Another of our summer interns, Clifford Mejia, was in Placencia this weekend learning more about it, and Courtney Menzies has this story.
Tourists don't normally take their trash home with them, but in Placencia, their plastic bottles can become souvenirs. That's because "Be Blue," an organization working in Placencia has gifted the village council with a 3D printer that upcycles trash.
Seth Gordon, Be Blue
"We've made this machine that takes plastic bottles and turns it into 3D printer filament and then we have a 3D printer which turns that filament into trinkets that look like this, this is an example of a keychain."
"I built the machine, the recreator 3D, it's built from plans that available for free on the internet, anyone can build one. The machine itself is recycled, it's built using parts from a broken 3D printer and those parts were reassembled into the machine that you see and that can take the bottles and turn them into something useful."
Terry Tao, Legal Adviser, Be Blue
"This is one of a kind machine. It is not something you can buy at the stores, it's not something you can buy on the internet, this is something that came from the ideas of a very smart engineer, Mr Seth who put this machine together. He mentioned that it's only $75 of parts, but if I was given $75 of parts I don't think I would put together a machine that could take plastic bottles and make them into souvenirs."
Rodwell Ferguson, Area Rep., Stann Creek West
"If you look at the sea everyday, you see bottle going to the sea so if we can accumulate them and recycle them that would be wonderful."
"If you notice today the building was filled with some from abroad and half from village. So it's obvious that the village would want to see something like this happen for Placencia, which is a tourist destination."
And aside from encouraging recycling, the new machine will also create a few jobs for the Placencia youths.
Terry Tao, Legal Adviser, Be Blue
"We are training the youth to learn how to not only design and implement 3D designs for the machine, different designs, things that people would be interested in, as well as learn how to operate the filament making, how to take plastic bottles and make it into the 3D prints."
Rodwell Ferguson, Area Rep., Stann Creek West
"It can create at least two or three jobs for young people and if we can replicate it across the country, then it can create so many for the country of Belize."
And the village council already has plans on how they will promote it:
Warren Garbutt, Chairman, Placencia
"We plan as the council to place this machine on our municipal pier, we have four little kiosks out there and the village council controls all of them but we have one and our aim is to put it in there and we'll see the volume that can be created but that is a place that we get a lot of traffic from not only cruise visitors but it's a little hub in Placencia, one of the most beautiful parts of the village so people go down to the pier and will be able to access these little souvenirs. Like I said, if we can create a huge volume, we may be able to sell them to local gift shops."
"We definitely have a lot of pride in our community, keeping it clean. The beach is one of our biggest assets and while we have plastics all over, the beach is especially inundated with plastic, especially during the rainy season when we get plastics just drifting onto our beaches. So those plastics as well as plastic bottles that are used in households, maybe we can encourage local homes to recycle or put aside plastic bottles and we collect them and turn them into souvenirs so there's a lot of potential with this, it's new so we are very excited about the possibilities."
