WSI AND EVERGREEN LABS ARE JOINING FORCES FOR WASTEWATER TREATMENT IN PLASTIC RECYCLING

Established in 2016 and headquartered in Da Nang, Vietnam, EVERGREEN LABS is a purpose-driven, creative business lab focused on innovating towards sustainable solutions and ventures for the future. With an international team comprised of future changemakers, they focus on solving today’s social and environmental issues www.evergreenlabs.org.

With their “ReForm Plastic” venture located in Vietnam and Myanmar, they are transforming low-value plastics into durable, competitive boards through simple processing and a fully inclusive model.

Recycling low-quality plastic, however, comes with an environmental challenge: The washing water required for the cleaning of the plastic waste prior to processing constitutes an extremely polluted effluent that needs to be treated to the (very strict) Vietnamese environmental standards… not an easy task.

To this end, WSI and EVERGREEN LABS teamed up and developed a decentralised, low-cost and easy to operate wastewater treatment solution for the ReForm facility in Hoi An / Vietnam. The treatments system combines several treatment steps: screening, septic tank, anaerobic baffled reactor (ABR), a trickling filter and disinfection.

After several weeks of operation and fine-tuning the system proved suitable, reducing the pollution load up to 90 %. WSI and EVERGREEN LABS are now preparing a concept for upscaling and dissemination among the many informal waste recycling facilities in the country.