Pangna Sun – Guest Speaker: Adele Foucart

I learned a lot about the recycling process of plastics from Adele Foucart’s talk about her Precious Plastic Shanghai project. Like Vouloudis’, her project also showcases the discussion we have been having from the film Bag It: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Every change seems to start with a small group of people who have a strong passionate to make that change happen. Her group’s passion was shown in their willingness to spend their resources and time to found this project on their own. In addition, despite the challenges in their path, they did not give up. As a result, they were able to accomplish their mission. The most successful part of their project was the involvements from many giant companies like Adidas, H&M and BMW. Although these companies did not directly fund them, they gave Adele and her colleagues the opportunity to educate many people about the plastic problem and the recycling process. It is essential to make people, especially young ones, aware of the problem, so they will become more flexible to change their plastic habit.

I was thinking about building these machines in my community while listening to her inspirational talk. This may sound quite ambitious and impossible because even Adele admitted that building those machines were not easy. For instance, even with the various skills that her exhibit, they were not able to build a working shredding machine. There were so many factors that caused things to go wrong because, even with detailed instructions from Precious Plastic videos, she could not find the materials or parts that work perfectly. It seemed like building these machines required a lot of technical skills and experiences. Still, this did not completely discourage from wanting to homemake those machines. It would be amazing and impactful to have this in my community becauseI can show my family and neighbors an efficient and creative way to deal with plastic trash. Currently, we do not have a way to deal with plastic trash at all. We do not even have a system that picks up the trash from our houses. Our current “solution” is burning those plastic waste, which is horrible to our environment and healths. It would be life-changing to start project in my society because it will provide a mean to deal with a huge portion of our everyday trash.