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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.
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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.
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Turning plastic waste into
resources
By design, the new programme’s impact is much broader than
ramping up supply for Original HP ink cartridges. The goal is
to improve nearly every aspect of the lives of the recycling
workers, from providing education for children to upgrading
the recycling systems so Thread and ECSSA can sell more
plastics, not just to HP but to other companies, and employ
more people.
A major goal of the coalition, which focuses on the “rst mile”
of global supply chains, is to give a better life to the children
in the community of 2,000 people who live on the Truitier
landll—the largest in Haiti at 530 acres. Children often work
alongside their parents to support the family. And because
Haiti’s schools are private, many of the bottle-collecting
families don’t have enough money to send their children
to school.
Work conducted a census to document the needs and ages of
what turned out to be more than 300 children working at the
landll. By the beginning of the year, every child under 15 is
expected to receive scholarships and be in school, while the
older teens will get remedial education and soft skills training.
The children also receive mentoring, food stipends, and health
care to ensure that they have the support they need to thrive
and excel.
Recycling gave Rosette and her family a new
lease on life after Haiti’s earthquake.
Providing opportunities for Haitians
To help bottle suppliers and collectors, Thread oers safety
instruction, micro-loans for buying sacks, and other nancing
needs, plus guidance on managing cash ow during quarterly
meetings that provide professional training and business
development. There’s also a peer-to-peer mentoring
programme. Ian Rosenberger, an earthquake-relief worker,
founded Thread to help pull Haiti’s people out of poverty and
give them more control over their lives. “If Haiti could gure
out how to turn trash into money = good,” he wrote in his diary
at the time. To scale up supply, Ellen Jackowski, HP’s head of
Global Programs, Environmental Sustainability, ew down
to Haiti with Jean-Luc Lavergne, the president of Lavergne,
the recycling company that helped create HP’s closed-loop
recycling system. Together they investigated to see what
it would take to bring ECSSA’s operations in line with the
standards HP requires for its suppliers.
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All of these steps add up to big changes for recycling on the island and more
opportunities for Haitian families. One bottle at a time, HP and its partners
are improving lives and livelihoods, while cleaning up Haiti.
Overcoming safety challenges
The initial shifts were small but critical: ECSSA needed to make safety improvements
on the recycling line, such as replacing the concrete blocks that workers stood on
with the safer platforms, painted yellow, that HP mandates.
The deeper, longer-term changes involved bringing HP’s expertise and knowledge
to bear on ECSSA’s processes to raise the quality of its output and enable ECSSA
to handle more materials processing in-house. ECSSA collects several types of
Learn more about
Original HP ink cartridges,
and how the company
lowered its carbon footprint.
plastic, some of which HP cannot use because it would contaminate the plastic in its
cartridges. So the partners developed systems to create squeaky-clean streams of
material to ensure that the plastics stay separate.
Dirt was another issue. Bottles in Haiti are often tossed on the ground due to a lack
of sanitation and recycling infrastructure. So they’re sandy or muddy when bottle
collectors pick them up. In the past, ECSSA would sort, compact, and ship the bottles
to the US, where they’d be ground up, washed, and sent to Lavergne in Canada for
further processing before being shipped back to HP to be turned into cartridges.
With HP’s help, ECSSA is investing in a system that will clean the bottles and grind
them into ake material in Haiti. That will cut costs of shipping bottles to the US for
processing, bringing more revenue to ECSSA—and its collectors. The clean plastic
also improves the quality of the shred, which can drive increased demand from other
buyers. This, in turn, will help create even more opportunities for collectors and
accelerates waste removal on the island.
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© Copyright 2018 HP Development Company, L.P. Article content provided by HP Garage Sta. The information contained herein is subject
to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying
such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or
editorial errors or omissions contained herein.
4AA7-2988EEW, June 2018
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