Filipino Engineer Recycles Plastic Garbage Into School Chairs

It’s always amazing whenever we hear about people utilizing their smarts towards saving the environment. Case in point, we’ve recently heard about Winchester Lemen, a mechanical engineer from Davao City, Philippines, who’s been running an awesome project that reduces plastic waste and benefits school children at the same time.

Lemen, who runs Envirotech Waste Recycling, collects plastic waste from landfills and turns them into colorful chairs for students. The idea came to him after an acquaintance visited his plant and asked if he could create something from recycled materials that could benefit school children.

At the time, Lemen had a chair prototype and the visitor immediately ordered 200 chairs.

In an interview with SmartParenting, Lemen reflected:

“Little did I know that he showed the chairs to Quezon City Mayor Herbert Bautista. After that, they created a ‘Green Fund’ for this particular project.”

The rest, as they say, is history.

Local government officials and several companies have started have since contacted Lemen so they can distribute more of these environment-friendly chairs to different public schools.

Fast forward to 2017, he began collaborating with entrepreneur-slash-environmentalist Derrick Tan to establish Winder Recycling Company.

According to Lemen:

“This is a partnership that helps create jobs, helps with reforestation and solves the problem of plastic waste.”

Through their project, Lemen says they’re helping resolve a big problem in the Philippine education system.

“We have a huge backlog of 1.7 million school chairs in our country. One of our objectives is to reduce the gap. The chairs can be used for a very long time, so we do not have to change them every year as was practiced in the past.”

Plastic bags, candy wrappers, drinking straws, food packaging, and others are used to create the school chairs. These plastic wastes are shredded, cleaned, melted, and then molded. Afterwards, the chairs are then assembled, sanded, and painted.

“Our chairs are very sturdy,” boasted Lemen. “The material is also fire retardant, has low lead content and zero mercury content.”

He likewise pointed out:

“We are saving a three-year-old tree, which is used to manufacture school chairs, for every plastic chair that we make using recycled plastic waste.”