Sanjaay Babu

Why I did this project

The Singapore Armed Forces' primary goal is not environmental sustainability. It is to protect the country's national security interests, and safeguard the livelihoods of the many millions that call Singapore home.

However, when the opportunity presents itself to safeguard environmental interests and maintain operational capability, we should seize on that opportunity. This was the guiding philosophy behind my project.

In the army, ziplock bags have numerous uses. They are clear & waterproof, enabling many essential use-cases. However, being made of thin plastic, holes are bound to form, eroding its waterproofing capabilities. As such, ziplocks need to be frequently replaced. What do we do once these ziplocks have to be replaced? Often, we simply throw them in the general waste bin. These are then sent to be incinerated. Plastic incineration causes serious environmental degradation.

I thought this is an easily avertable problem, one that wouldn't harm the quality of military operations while substantially moving the needle in the way of environmental sustainability.

What I did

Initially, our plan was to simply recycle the used ziplock bags. For most people, all this means is to change where we dispose the waste - rather than going into a black/green general waste bin, it'll go into a blue recycling bin. However, I soon realized that there is much more to recycling than simply throwing the waste into a different box.

First, there are two types of recycling:

Mechanical recycling: This essentially refers to crushing old plastic products, and reformulating them into new plastic pellets that can be used to make new plastic products. This works best for uncontaminated plastics (plastics that don't contain any biological materials). By nature of mechanical recycling, contaminated plastics significantly reduce the yield of recycling processes.
Chemical recycling: This refers to essentially breaking down the plastics into their chemical components, before re-constituting them into new chemical structures for alternate uses.

After having done a quick sample of the contamination level of ziplock bags disposed by soldiers, we realized that much of the plastic is contaminated. There's therefore little value in attempting mechanical recycling - instead, chemical recycling is the gold standard. As such, our project had two levers.

Collecting used plastics

To collect soldiers' used plastics, we had to form a new recycling habit. There were two challenges we faced in this process.

Because chemical recycling becomes highly ineffective when there are non-plastics - such as cans, paper, etc. - in the sample. But most people think that recycling bins are general - there's a misconception that you can throw any recyclable material in that bin.
Soldiers had a pre-existing habit of throwing trash into general waste bins. We had to break this habit and form a new habit of disposing waste in bins.

To do this, we started to incorporate some behavioral science. We learnt that the ziplock bag collection receptacle should look completely different from a bin - so that it isn't mixed up for a waste bin at all. We also learnt that there is value in reducing all possible friction to recycling - rather than requiring soldiers to walk long distances to get to the recycling bin, we wanted to make it equally easy to recycle as it is to throw waste into the general waste bin. Soldiers don't inheretntly resent recycling, so when it was equally easy to recycle as it was to dispose bags in waste bins, we saw recycling rates rise.

Partnership with Magorium

We also needed a partner for chemical recycling. Incidentally, I met with Oh Chu Xian, the founder of Magorium. Magorium is a Singapore-founded green startup that uses chemical recycling to convert ziplock bags into asphalt for road paving.

Magorium had engaged in prior projects with the Air Force, so they made for a perfect partner. There was serious potential for us to build a neat cyclical loop here - ziplock bag waste produced by the Army would be converted into asphalt for the Air Force. This reduces the Air Force's need to procure traditional asphalt, and reduces the waste emissions from the Army.

We ran a pilot chemical recycling trial with a waste sample we collected in our military base, and upon its success, we decided that the project was worth expanding.

Behavioral Nudges

Used behavior science and "choice architecture" to encourage people to increase recycling bin utilization rates. By redesigning the placement and labeling of bins, we created environments where the sustainable choice became the easy choice.

What's Next

The Singapore Armed Forces has recently significantly increaed its commitment towards environmental sustainability. One of their key goals is to reduce waste incineration by 30% by 2030. We thought our project could help the sustainability office achieve this goal by redirecting recyclable waste into recycling bins.

Working with the SAF Sustainabilty Office was an amazing experience. I had the privilege of working with a team that went all out to help the Army achieve small wins in sustainability wherever possible. While working within military bureaucracy had its frictions (inherent but necessary when making large-scale decisions), I was broadly impressed with the commitment and enthusiasm the SAFSO had to support a ground-up project.

Now, the SAFSO is conducting a larger-scale pilot to test the feasibility of the collection and upcycling mechanisms. While I'm no longer directly anchoring this project, I still remain invested in its reults, and hope that the initiative we started as a small project within our battalion can end up creating large scale national change!