Sapuraua Blow Moulder

Overview

The Saparua Blow Moulder project, undertaken between 2022 and 2023, aimed to address the pressing issue of plastic waste management on Saparua Island, Indonesia. Due to a lack of recycling mechanisms, waste was often dumped into the sea, leading to pollution. The local community wanted to move beyond simply collecting plastic waste to sorting and processing it into useful items for agriculture, farming, and fishing.

The Challenge

With The Constellation’s support, the people of Saparua began devising a waste management system for the island, but it could initially collect only about 33% of total waste and could not complete the recycling process. Existing machinery allowed them to create plastic pellets, but not the diverse range of hollow products they needed. To overcome this, the project set out to design a low-cost, easy-to-use PET blow molding machine tailored to the island’s constraints.

The Solution

The project was adopted into the Mechanical Engineering Department at Imperial College London and taken on by a student working closely with the Saparua community. After several discussions, the team chose reusable ice packs as the initial product. A pellet maker already present on the island was used as the base to create the preforms required for the ice packs, and a temperature-control system was developed that remained simple to operate. The newly developed moulder enabled the community to create hollow products by blowing air into solid plastic preforms, greatly expanding the range of items they could produce from recycled plastic.

Impact

In student feedback, the technical difficulty of the project was described as modest, but the real challenge lay in simplifying industrial processes so they could be applied in Saparua’s context. Working on the project highlighted how reimagining complex machinery for local use can create social impact and confirmed an interest in recycling technologies and open-source processes that can be shared more widely. Overall, the initiative demonstrates how tailored engineering solutions can empower local communities to tackle environmental issues and build more sustainable waste systems.