It’s time to say bye to Green is the New Black!
It’s time to say bye to Green is the New Black!Please enjoy this video that outs together what we did through out this semester!
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1PxFxGjSjo7q5aUHIjXFNMplmCRl5vCWX
It is finally the end of the semester! As the semester comes to an end, it is time to wrap up what we did this semester for our EACAP project. Our team (Green is the New Black) worked closely with an organization on the Penn State Berks campus called Trimatis. Trimatis is a startup organization founded by Dr. Marietta Scanlon and two current Penn State Berks students: Tito Orjih and Jason Lehrer. They decided to use sustainability to connect education and innovative technology together. For their current project, they are looking to turn 3D printing sustainable. 3D printing is often trial and error, which means that most of the time things that are 3D printed end up as waste. The founders of Trimatis came up with the idea to use plastic bottles as filament in order to reduce the amount of waste actually being produced. For this project, they needed empty grade one plastic bottles. They then needed a marketing team, implementation team, and data collection team in order to help them with a trial run of the project.
Green is the New Black decided to be the marketing team. This meant that our job was to raise awareness about the new initiative around Penn State Berks campus. Since it is a new project, only one building, Gaige, was designated as the trial run location. Here, we posted flyers designed by our team on bulletin boards relating to Trimatis and their initiative. Then we created posters to place on the collection bins meant for the plastic bottles. These posters explained what kind of bottles Trimatis was looking for that the students around campus could then learn about in order to contribute. Finally we made an LED slide to put on the big TV in Gaige. But, we ran into a problem. People were putting regular trash in our collection bins instead of just plastic bottles. To correct this problem, we moved the poster to a more visible location and added examples of the types of bottles we were looking for to the posters. This seemed to pay off because the plastic bottles starting piling up. The final component of our marketing job was to create a video for the Trimatis website which showed exactly what we did for the project.
We as a team were amazed to learn that this was a student created organization. We also think that this idea of recycling bottles to be used as 3D filament is a very creative idea that could make a large impact on innovation for the future. We never would have thought before about what 3D printing could do for the environment.This organization taught us a lot about things that we normally wouldn’t have been exposed to. We were very glad to be a part of this startup organization, and we hope that they continue to collect plastic bottles from other buildings on campus so they can get an even greater result than they got during the semester we worked with them.
Many people seem to think that with a limited amount of time on their hands between things such as school, work, and family, that they simply do not have any extra time to spend on helping the environment. However, for anyone interested in environmental protection, we are here to tell you that you don’t need to use up any more than as much as a few seconds a day on helping our planet thrive. As a group who dealt directly with the repurposing and reusing of waste, we believe that if just a few more people could help spread the word, we could use the 6 R’s to clean up our only home- Earth– one bottle at a time. If there were more collection bins throughout the country, we as a community could repurpose so much more plastic into 3D printing filament. This filament can then be used to create so many more things rather than most of it just ending up at some landfill doing nobody any good. So take the time, learn more about Trimatis, and help out your environment today!
