In the past few weeks, we were busy building our first prototype with Proper Plastic.

With Green Initiatives happening in Yerevan – an environmental awareness project in partnership with Global Environmental Facility (GEF), UNDP in Armenia and Ministry of Nature Protection in Armenia – we decided to build a coffee table using recycled plastic and solar panels. The idea was to build something aesthetically good-looking, but also functional for everyday use. We wanted to raise awareness with this product to the idea of using “waste” as raw material.

We started with a call for HDPE plastic from the public. We soon learned that most people aren’t aware of the different types of plastic, and decided that this too is something we need to address if we want to mobilise them. We also partnered with some local organisations that collect and recycle plastic, and for our table, we were graciously given 50kg of plastic bottle caps.

Next we used the shredder to get the raw material. I want to mention here that we had to edit the shredder from the initial design on the website, to get it to shred the hard plastic caps. We also had to edit the engine capacity and electric wiring to get the perfect functionality out of the machine.

Our metal guy, Hratch Plastic as we like to call him, prepared the moulds for us and we started baking the shredded plastic in the oven. Here too we had to edit the design and capacity of the oven, to make sure we would use electricity efficiently and wouldn’t lose heat in the baking process.

We did a number of prototypes on this, in the process of figuring out what pressure and temperature work best. At the end, we managed to make sheets of plastic that we used for the table. We used 3kg of HDPE plastic caps to make 6 sheets.

Once we had the plastic ready, we assembled the table with the solar panels on the metal frame and added some USB cables for different phone charges, and displayed the table at the temporary pavilion on Northern Avenue for a week.

Visitors interacted with the table quite well, partly because they were able to charge their phones, but mostly because they saw the potential of waste and what can be built with it.