IT'S been six years since Envirotech Waste Recycling Inc. (Envirotech or EWRI) has been established and from the fledgling Davao company that advocated for waste plastic recycling, the advocacy remains the same with more and more being convinced that even the sando bags that regularly clog our drains and cause massive flooding can be reused.
In fact, as it moves onto its seventh year next year, it is moving up as well to include more clients and ideas.
From just making plastic school desks and park benches, that is slowly becoming the in thing in public and private schools because the products need less maintenance and can outlast any other school desk whether wood or steel, it is now about to introduce sanitation in inner city areas.
Among the projects Envirotech is working on these days, with its president Winchester Lemensaid, is a partnership with the Tambayan center for Children's Rights Inc.
The partnership intends to make portalets in three urban settlements in Sasa from the plastic wastes collected right in the villages. They're still working on the memorandum of agreement at this time although he hopes that the project will go full blast by January 2017.
It's two-pronged: the villages are cleaned of waste plastics, and the urban settlements get their portalets. At the AES Coal Power Plant in Candelaria, Zambales, the plant's foundation for its corporate social responsibility has acquired Envirotech's facility and will be producing 2,000 school chairs per month to provide for the growing number of students in the town.
EWRI will be running and maintaining the facility for AES. It also partnered last August with Recycle Plus Inc, the official hauler of plastic wastes of Monde Nissin, to produce 7,200 school chairs a year in three years.
Following the Green Fund Summit of Quezon City, Robinsons Supermarket engaged with EWRI to produce 12,000 school chairs for 2017.
The initial is 1,500 chairs will be distributed under the school program of Robinsons in December 2016. It has continued to partner with LGUs, the most recent being the contract with Koronadal City and Digos City, but Lemen says, there's still a lot to be done.
"We have 4,000 LGU's and still have a long way to go to help clean the plastic wastes in the landfill. The backlog of school chairs is around 2M," he said.
Indeed, there's a lot more in the pipeline that will see not just school chairs and park benches, but basketball boards, cones, kickboards, pull buoys, basketball benches, and the most exciting being... low-cost housing. These are what awaits Envirotech in 2017. There is indeed a lot to look forward to in this Davao-born initiative.