We're Team Kick Some Glass! From left to right:
We’re working with the Maa Trust, a non-profit organization based in the Maasai Mara region of Kenya. The Maa Trust prioritizes preserving wildlife while encouraging sustainable business practices in the process. The Maa Trust is based in an economically male-dominated region and they aim to empower women and youth by increasing their financial independence through various sustainable initiatives, one being the glass crusher project. After talking with the Maa Trust about their desire for a glass crusher, the goal of our project is to design and prototype a mechanism to take in glass waste in the form of wine bottles and crush it into a sand-like material. As a result of local tourism, wine bottles are a significant form of waste in the Maasai Mara. Unfortunately, there is no convenient way to recycle these bottles, as the closest recycling centers are hours away by car. Thus, we hope to bridge this gap, both helping the Maasai Mara ecologically and helping the Maa Trust’s various programs that empower women and youth. Initially, we had planned on working off of last year’s team’s final design concept, which consisted of two crushing phases: a bicycle-powered crank and slider mechanism to crush bottles into smaller pieces and a motorized impact mill to crush the pieces into fine glass, as shown below. Due to changes in the project brief and discrepancies with our user requirements, we ultimately decided to pivot and to essentially restart the project from scratch. After much research and conceptualization, we decided to pursue a tumbler design, which consolidates the crushing process into one phase rather than two. At the end of last quarter, we very briefly began our prototyping process, and our plan moving forward is to continue to refine and eventually solidify our design. We plan to present a fully functional, highly refined prototype by the end of this quarter that is motorized, to scale (able to accommodate at least 3-5 glass bottles at a time), and easy to use. We are excited to keep you updated on our progress!
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