Make PPE out of recycled plastic
The Precious Plastic community, with its hundreds of workspaces around the world, is hard at work to develop local, distributed and open source solutions to tackle the global pandemic. This includes the production of personal protective equipment (PPE).
The UK National Health Service is estimated to have used an average of 14 million items of PPE every day between 25th February and 18th April 2020
SourceBenefits
- Utilise waste plastic to create useful personal protective equipment (PPE)
- Flexible to the needs at the time
- Can manufacture PPE 75 times faster than a 3D printer
- Once set up, can produce a range of items, not just PPE
Challenges
- Sometimes virgin plastic must be used to reach local PPE requirements
- Must be designed to be reusable, otherwise creates more plastic waste longe term
Making a difference
A Precious Plastic workspace in Gran Canaria provided over 3,000 face visors for the government, hospitals and private sector.