About this idea
The entertainment industry uses customized body forms to make costumes and creatures.
Artists take 3d scans of their subjects and mill the body forms from large blocks of dense urethane foam. The foams are made from a toxic soup of urethane resins that emit cyanide gas as they cure. There is also a great deal of waste of ground-away foam that becomes discarded. The resulting milled body is fragile, needs coated in a rigid material, and needs hours of work to pin it to make it segmented. The material is also expensive. Urethane foam blocks of that size cost more than $1500 each.
I want to change all that.
I use 3d printers that melt plastics and build objects layer by layer. I already serve the artist and entertainment industries and have a network of clients to market this to.
My machines are enormous. I can build bodies faster that do not need hard-coated, come already pinned, and be made from 100% post-consumer waste plastics.
By using recycled materials, I lower the cost of manufacturing these bodies. Thus, it reduces the cost of materials and vastly increases margins. Using 3d printing also speeds up the process and improves throughput.
My idea is scalable in the prop, sign, and mannequin industry as well.
I want to purchase a machine that will grind plastics into the pellets.
Impact
There is a great need to develop business concepts that reduce waste.
I have tested my method using the plastic from water bottles. It's called PET.
But I also feel there is potential for utilizing discarded face masks.
Disposable facemasks are made from polypropylene. MIT suggests that 84 million kilograms of waste were made from facemasks alone from the first six months of the pandemic. So let's face it, masks will be around for some time in some capacity.
This is an excellent source of cheap material that can be put to better use.
This offers a tremendous financial opportunity for my small business.
We are located in a low-income rural area. If this is successful, it would mean more employees and reinvestment.
What I'll do with $5,000
I wish to purchase a device that shreds plastics for use in my 3d printers. I also want to buy some ancillary equipment that cleans plastics to be shredded.
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