SeyTreasure
from Trash to Treasure
since the beginning of 2022 we are doing regular (almost daily) voluntary beach clean ups which made us start investigating on ideas on how to stop plastic from entering to the landfill and how to recycle it locally.
Our landfill is said to reach its full capacity by 2025
We do have a Pet Bottle and Can Recycling System in Seychelles, but the crushed products will not be recycled locally in Seychelles,but exported for further processing.
After doing research we found Precious Plastic – an open hardware plastic recycling project which is a type of open source digital commons project. It allows you to turn plastic waste into new reusable items on a small scale.Its already successfully running in many different countries.
And here we are today, the first and only precious plastic workspace in Seychelles
Marine Litter / Ocean Trash
So far only a quite small amount of the marine litter can be recycled as its different mixed types of plastics mostly unlabeled which makes it really difficult.
Considering the close proximity of our landfill to the ocean, any of those items there could possibly end up in the ocean, so our goal is to redirect the usable plastic waste before it ends up on the landfill and potentially in the sea.
Marine litter we can recycle:
- different types of bottle caps (the ones without inlay)
- any containers from HDPE or PP
- beach toys (if unbroken its better to reuse than to recycle)
Marine litter we cannot recycle:
- Polystyrene
- Flipflops
- PET bottles (the clean ones we return to redeem centers)
- Cans (the clean ones we return to redeem centers)
- Straws (working on this one!)
- Lighters
- Snack packages and plastic bags
- Tyres
- Toothbrushes
- Bottle Caps with inlay (e.g Seypearl Cola / Fanta)
- Fishing equiptment e.g. ropes / fishing lines
- Microplastic
In 2023, after finding a lot of mangrove propagules (seedlings) all along the beach we gave a try and planted them in an erroded area next to the river and we are happily seeing first results by now.
