Abakah-Paintsil said, “3D printing was an avenue for us to explore in the sense that we could actually make whatever we needed in the physical realm for us to see.”
Group member Nyankum was also worried about the rate of visiting factories to get their hands on simple, customized educational materials.
Making small items at a high cost using industry companies, when they could really just be 3D printed for less, is normal. The KLAKS 3D initiative promises to stop this runaround way of creating things with their new e-waste 3D printer. Some of the materials they’ve collected to make their printer include screws, bike tubes, land cables, and motors from old, burned-out printers and photocopiers. The electronics for the printer are not made in Ghana, but pretty much everything else is, including the e-waste. It is locally sourced from large markets like the Agblogbloshie Market, a former wetland and suburb of Accra, Ghana, and home to the world’s largest e-waste dumping site. Considering that we throw away over 2 million tons of computers, cell phones, and other consumer electronics every year, the site must be pretty massive.“We had a problem with packaging, since we also like practical things we got fed up from always having to imagine things our lecturers have been saying and teaching,” said Abakah-Paintsil.
“What we considered was the fact that we have so much e-waste around,” explained Abakah-Paintsil. “There is the potential of making new things out of what people have discarded as waste. So we take advantage of that.”
He added that by building the 3D printer with e-waste, it drastically reduces the cost, since they don’t have to import everything. The KLAKS 3D e-waste printer is an open source design, and the team’s goal is to see their printers being used to enhance education and learning in schools. They are projecting that within five to ten years, their printers will be used in every basic school, junior high, and high school to improve upon the educational experiences of both the students and the teachers.
- Access to maker space equipment
- Business and technical mentoring
- Subsidized office, prototyping, and production space
- Investment Readiness preparation
- Introduction to their network of customers and preferred investors
- Membership to The Hive Community, a support ecosystem for entrepreneurs and startups
Kumasi Hive’s co-founder and head of the Incubator Program, Anna Lowe, believes that it is critically important to invest in engineering, for the sake of the country’s national development. The KLAKS 3D printer is especially valuable, as it addresses both the affordability of 3D printing technology, and the ongoing issue of massive amounts of electronic waste.
“We need to give business support to engineering and hardware companies especially on systematisation,” she said.
KLAKS 3D has the potential to be scaled up – it has already sold one of the e-waste 3D printers to a non-government organization, and the team is reporting a high demand for their creation. Since they use e-waste to build it, they will need to secure a main supply chain of recycled components. Discuss in the KLAKS 3D forum at 3DPB.com.
[Source: Joy Online / Images: KLAKS 3D via Facebook]