Full Circle Filament: Your waste is our resource

Full Circle Filament is a social enterprise that will partner with waste picker communities to increase their incomes, while reducing the growing problem of plastic waste. We will transform waste plastic into high-quality 3D printing filament and we believe our model is one that can be replicated wherever waste pickers work. And working with traditional recycling value chains is even simpler.

We're collaborating with Covestro's inclusive business unit and Thammasat University's material science lab (among others) to develop a premium product. Once our filament is ready, we'll sell it through local and international B2B and B2C channels. 

In the future, we will expand into making socially beneficial products, 3D printed or otherwise. The aim will always be to develop solutions in place that reuse the waste materials that are being created locally to create products that are socially beneficial, reduce plastic pollution, and provide living wages.

The problem we’re addressing is plastic waste — one that’s massive in scale and diffuse in nature. It overlaps with a number of challenges like resource use, infrastructure, and pollution. In short, it is a wicked problem — one that is “difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize.” So, we are not trying to solve the plastic waste problem in general. Instead, we’re looking to initially reduce the 24% of Bangkok’s municipal waste that’s plastic by increasing the amount of PET plastic that’s recycled (<50% is currently recycled), as well as the amount of post-industrial plastic that’s recycled. If we can make that work, we can begin to expand into other cities in Thailand, as well as our neighboring countries.

Comprehensive statistics are lacking, but a recent study found that waste pickers in a single, outlying district of Bangkok collect over 14,000T of waste plastic per year. Multiplying that across Bangkok yields a rough figure that’s a huge target to aim for before we even look beyond our city limits.

The primary group that we’ll serve is the informal waste picker community. We’ll directly improve their incomes by paying above market rates for the materials they sell to us, but we’ll also work to improve their lives in other ways. First, we’ll look into providing proper safety gear to help reduce injuries, accidents, and infections. We’re also planning to work with the community to devise better methods of waste plastic collection, so that they might increase their incomes while increasing the volume of material recycled. Once we get to breakeven, we want to establish a lab that will research opportunities to convert additional plastics into 3D printing media, as well as other useful products. Doing so will offer us the possibility of paying above market rates for those materials, thereby increasing their utility for waste pickers. We’ll also develop a 3D printing lab that will invite our waste picker partners to learn the capabilities of the machine and work with them to develop products that offer social value in their lives, things like tools, replacement parts, and prosthesis are obvious possibilities, but we’re excited to see what the community comes up with.

Our solution involves the integration of the informal waste picking community directly into our supply chain. Waste pickers typically sell their materials to shop houses that sell them to material aggregators. Aggregators sell their materials to processors who turn the waste back into raw materials that can then be sold to end users. In our case, we’ll cut out the transport costs (and the associated greenhouse gases) and the multiple margins in the supply chain and pass on savings to the waste pickers. 

Formal recycling is typically infrastructure intensive. In our case, we’re planning to reduce infrastructure costs by using manual machinery in our front end processing that will create a number of jobs that pay living wages. This stage will take care of shredding the material down to the appropriate size for further processing, as well as cleaning the material to the level necessary for high-quality filament. (This work will initially be outsourced as we develop the product and market.)

From there the raw materials will be blended and colorants added to give us the resin that will be made into filaments. Resins will then be extruded into filaments that will be sold to B2B and B2C customers. All of this work will be performed in a safe, clean, cool environment and all workers will be paid living wages.

Our initial end product will be 3D printing filament, but we’re planning to investigate opportunities wherever possible and turn our lab loose to develop possibilities. The goal will always be to take the materials that are available with volume in a specific area and transform those materials into socially beneficial products. We’re interested in looking into things like building materials (for things like homes and roads) to help combat the deleterious effects of this region’s mix of high heat and humidity.

There are a number of firms that make 3D printing filament, but few are held in regard for making a high-quality product. There are also very few that make filament with recycled content. We are aiming to become a leader that reliable produces high-quality filament, and does so with recycled content. On top of that, we intend to source plastic from informal waste pickers. This is a unique approach for commercial filament production. Our model offers customers both social and environmental benefits. We believe those will help us get customers to try our product. To keep them, we need to offer the high quality that customers demand.

Our model is premised on existing technology, with the idea of developing some of our own on the upstream processing side. This would be manual machinery to help with flaking and cleaning PET bottles to prepare the material for blending. We're planning to outsource that work at first while we focus on proving that there's demand for the product and get all of the downstream operations working properly. 

Once we have that up and running, we want to work with experts like mechanical engineers and material scientists, as well as individuals who work in recycling, to see what opportunities we could pursue to develop our own methods. (We've been in touch with others that are developing small scale models and will look to partner with those efforts when we're ready to start.) But we don't want to pursue those possibilities until we have an idea of the scale we would be working with. (Is it a smaller version of existing solutions or something radically different that might be manually powered?) We don't know enough yet to start down that path as one of our goals is to figure out what's the minimum viable scale of our operations for replication before we look to right-size the equipment and processes that will be part of that solution.

We'll also develop IP in the form of plastic blends for our filaments. This will give us protection from copycat products.

Our solution is straightforward. We pay the informal waste pickers above market rates for their materials. They'll have a direct benefit for every Kg they sell to us, and we'll be able to easily quantify the social and environmental benefits we create. The nice part, at least for the foreseeable future, is that we've selected to compete in a sector that's in the midst of exponential growth that's expected to be fastest in Asia at least for the next 4-5 years. These circumstances won't go on forever, but we're getting in at a time when we won't have to create demand. We just have to meet it with a quality product at a reasonable price. If we can do that, and ensure that are target customers are aware of our products, we'll be positioned well for early success.

We're in pre-Seed stage, so we're not currently serving any customers. We're running tests with our existing prototype and getting ready for a rapid prototyping project with our lab to get our product to where it needs to be to go to market.

Our goal is to have hundreds of customers within one year and thousands within five years on the B2C side. For B2B, we're aiming to have five customers by the end of year one, with at least one of those being an additive manufacturing firm. (We do not have a five year project on the B2B side of our business.) 

On the plastic sourcing side, we expect to work directly with at least a few dozen waste pickers in the first year, as well as a couple hundred through shop houses we have relationships with. By year five, we hope to have operations in 3 countries and direct sourcing from hundreds, if not thousands, of waste pickers. Once we get our model right, there's ample opportunity for expansion within Thailand and around the world.

We have multiple goals we're pursuing. The overarching one is to build a large and growing community of people who view waste as a resource. We also want to build a thriving business that has a positive impact on the environment and as many lives as possible. Our model makes it easy to both make positive impacts, as well as to track those impacts. By paying above market rates for our materials, we'll know exactly what the additional amount we're paying is and we'll be able to track that by the number of people it was paid out to and over what time frames. We'll also be able to track our environmental benefits based on the same thing. Things like virgin plastic production and greenhouse gases avoided will all be based on metrics that are calculated on a per ton basis.

Our primary barrier at this point is financial. We need the startup capital necessary to bring our first product to market and complete our market research.

We also have a small technical barrier to overcome, in terms of refining our product to the point that it's ready for market. Our goal is to deliver the highest possible quality from a recycled product, so we've given ourselves a serious challenge there. But we believe have the right partners in place to overcome our initial technical hurdles. 

We also expect to have legal challenges with competitors copying our product and possibly our branding, so we need to get everything we can in place for that before we go to market. 

Cultural barriers may come up as we work to build ties with new waste picker communities and market barriers exist with some retail channels here where they expect you to pay for shelf space. Finding good partners will help with each of those challenges.

To get past our financial barrier, we're pursuing several grants like this one, with the hope of gaining a few of them as initial startup capital. We're simultaneously pursuing CSR funds. Between the two, we're hoping to have at least $100,000 USD to make our initial hires and go full speed ahead on our lab work and market research.

For technical barriers, we already have our partners at Covestro and the Thammasat University material science lab, and we're looking to find additional partners who can help in the areas where we currently lack expertise. 

We're signed up for legal help from Trust Law, so we'll have pro bono support from them and we'll supplement that as needed.

For cultural barriers, our founder has colleagues that are Thai nationals with deep experience working with informal workers that he can go to for assistance and we intend to develop partnerships with organizations like WIEGO and others that are working on the ground.

Our organization will be a for-profit social enterprise. In Thailand, that means we have to reinvest at least 51% of our profits into socially-beneficial efforts. That reinvestment will go into scaling, replication, and R&D that will turn waste into socially-valuable products.

We currently have three people collaborating on the project.

Chris Oestereich is the founder. He's currently a full-time academic at Thammasat University. He previously led zero waste programs in the US grocery industry and he has helped many organizations move towards the circular economy.

Kah Wei Yoong is our COO. She brings a wealth of experience around bootstrapping startups to the effort.

Eileen Chantaranakarach leads our marketing/branding efforts. She has deep experience in both Southeast Asian and Western contexts.

We're looking to hire at least two more team members as soon as possible to help with branding, market research, and testing.

We believe we have the necessary levels of passion and purpose that are required to deliver on a project like this. We've had success working on related challenges and we're excited about the possibilities this project offers. We've launched businesses, and led large-scale collaborative projects, so we know how to build a plan of action, as well as how to adjust when things don't go to plan. Moreover, we believe that this project offers a model that could make a big impact far beyond whatever we do directly in this effort.

Covestro is providing blending capacity and material science expertise.

Endeva is offering inclusive businesses expertise and project management support.

Thammasat University's material science lab is bringing material expertise and lab capacity.

Filabot is offering filament extrusion expertise.

WeLearn offers testing and access to classes.

Circular Design Lab offers systemic design workshops as a platform developing new 3D printed products.

Our beneficiaries are also our suppliers. They are the ones who collect the waste plastic that goes into our products. They'll benefit by receiving above market rates, safety gear, and training.

The populations we serve are the various groups engaged in 3D printing. They include hobbyists and maker spaces on the B2C side. On the B2B side, there's additive manufacturing (firms that engage directly in making 3D printed projects at scale, and what we've termed as "low volume 3D printing" for business. Initially, we will not focus our efforts on the low volume segment as it is highly fragmented.

Our other beneficiary is society as a whole as we are working to reduce plastic pollution, an effort which all benefit from.

Our team participated in the ImpacTech Thailand's 2018/2019 cohort. In that program, we developed a business plan which aims to get the organization to profitability within eighteen months. To get there, we're aiming to raise $350,00 USD through a variety of channels. Initially, we're focusing on grant opportunities and CSR funding. We believe that our social and environmental benefits make both of these channels a good fit for our early stage funding needs. Once we're a little farther down the tracks, we'll be good candidates for investments and loans, but we're not currently seeking those due to our being at the pre-Seed stage. Many investors have expressed interest, but we're holding them off until we can prove we've removed significant risk from our model by finalizing our go to market product and our market research. With those two things in hand and orders being filled, we'll be able to have a very different conversation with both investors and lenders.

We’re looking for access to expertise and the recognition that would come with being an MIT Solve awardee. The former could help us accelerate our progress on the technical side as well as in figuring out the nuances of approaching our market. The latter will open the door to a world of funding and partnership opportunities. Having won our demo day (the business pitching event at the end of the ImpacTech incubator we participated in) has been a great door opener that’s made it easier to connect with partners and it has also helped open ongoing conversations with potential funders. Adding MIT Solve to our story would help open additional doors while lending us significant credibility with the funders we're already in discussions with. 

Thinking longer-term, we want to be part of the MIT Solve community. Our founder is a faculty member at the School of Global Studies at Thammasat University where he teaches classes on social enterprise, social innovation, sustainability, and advocacy. He’s constantly working to grow networks of individuals and organizations that can come together to work on humanity’s big challenges. Being a part of the MIT Solve community seems the perfect place to continue that work.

On the upstream side of our operations, we'd like to partner with organizations like WIEGO, an organization that aims to improve the lives of informal workers, with a focus on women, through research and policy work, as well as local organizations that work directly with informal workers. We'd also like to partner with multinational beverage companies. As they wrestle with society's growing interest in plastic pollution, we can give them a CSR spend that can offer life beyond the standard charitable contribution, that will work to support their recycling goals. We’ve had initial discussions with Coca-Cola and are interested in finding ways to partner.

Within our organization, we could use additional technical expertise. In building a new model, we need to rethink the ways in which upfront processing is done to reduce capital and operating costs. Doing so would allow us to compete against larger competitors with small scale operations. Those would then be highly replicable. We’d also be interested in partnering with organizations with deep experience in extrusion to help us refine our methods to develop a premium recycled filament.

On the downstream side, we’re looking for leading 3D printer manufacturer like Prusa to partner with for testing and other purposes, as well as a firm that does additive manufacturing. A firm like HP that can help open doors and guide us on the retail end of things would also be a great potential partner.

The GM prize would allow us to hire the team we need to go full speed ahead in getting our solution to market. This would mean having the people in place to lead the laboratory work and related testing, as well as the upstream work to develop the supply chain that would source material from the waste pickers. (Much of that would be time spent developing relationships and trust with members of those communities and the people they work with.) We would also finalize our market research and begin developing our brand. For that, we will hire a small team that will lead 3D printing workshops, develop content for social media, and give presentations at schools. That team would also be responsible for working with the founder and COO to begin to develop sales channels.