Hewlett Packard N9J71AE Product Data Sheet
Reinvent Impact
Turning Haiti’s mountains
of plastic garbage into
high-tech printer gear
With innovative designs and a recycling
solution, HP and its partners help create new
revenue streams for a recovering community.
In Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake, piles of plastic bottles
littering the island mushroomed into mountains.
It was an unintended consequence of relief eorts. The
country’s already weak trash-collection system buckled.
Bottled water and other supplies shipped in to help Haitians
wound up everywhere—in canals, on beaches, and lining
the streets.
Now, those bottles are nding a second life as printer
cartridges. All through a radical
recycling project started by the First Mile
Coalition—a collaboration between HP,
Thread International (a social enterprise
that turns plastic waste bottles into
new products), Timberland, Work (a
nonprot in Haiti), and the Association
des Collecteurs des Objets en Plastique.
Together, they’re creating market
opportunities to generate new jobs, oer
health and safety training, and provide
education for hundreds of children who
once spent their days collecting trash to
help support their families.
In June 2017, HP started selling the
rst ink cartridges made from Haiti’s
plastic bottles and other sources. So
far, 380,000 pounds of plastic have
been recycled and moved through the HP material pipeline.
And HP is exploring ways to use the recycled material in other
products besides ink cartridges.
“This initiative supports our overall eorts to reinvent the way
we design, manufacture, and recover our products as we shift
toward a circular and low-carbon economy,” said Nate Hurst,
HP Chief Sustainability and Social Impact Oicer.
“It supports our long-standing commitments to responsibly
source materials for our products and treat all workers in
our supply chain with dignity and respect.” At the centre of
the programme is Environmental Cleaning Solutions S.A.
(ECSSA), a company founded seven years ago by Edouard
Carrie, a young Haitian who lived through the earthquake. “It
was terrifying, but the real tragedy was the aftermath,” says
Carrie. “Once you realise the impact, you
immediately start feeling that need to
help others.”
After returning to college at the
University of Tampa, Carrie’s experience
inspired him to create a recycling
business as part of his senior project.
Carrie wrangled an internship from a
classmate’s father who ran a recycling
company in Connecticut and then
returned home to Haiti to start his own
business at age 23.
Thread began working with ECSSA
in 2015, creating plastic-based
fabrics for apparel makers, including
Timberland. But Thread was unable
to use all of the types of plastics and
colours that were used in many of these recycled bottles. After
discovering that HP used PET plastics, along with a broader
array of colours, ECSSA approached HP about teaming up.
With HP using 1 million plastic bottles a day in its closed-loop
cartridge manufacturing, even sourcing a small portion of that
from Haiti would be huge.
2
Loading...