Good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity to speak before the committee.
As a department head and researcher at the Selkirk Technology Access Centre here in the Kootenay region of British Columbia, we have really focused on supporting industry and community in our learning region through research and development and through training in advanced manufacturing and advanced computing.
Since 2020, the STAC has been fortunate enough to work with some amazing industry and community partners throughout our region to foster circular economy practices and to advance both education and research in plastics recycling and reuse.
I also want to share a few examples of projects we've been working on. I'll start with KC Recycling.
KC Recycling is here in Trail, B.C., and they recycle car batteries as one of their outputs or business models. They recycle polypropylene from car batteries in the amount of 200 tonnes per month and are looking to double and possibly even triple that into the future. One hundred per cent of this plastic is currently being packaged and shipped in pellet form across North America to go back into batteries or other automotive industry plastics.
The research we've been working on with KC Recycling directly has been to use these pellets as something else. We've successfully been able to use it as a feedstock for 3D printing and injection moulding. We've also been looking at other opportunities locally, and that's the key here. Instead of having this material shipped here, processed, and then shipped back out across the world, we're looking at what we can use this plastic for locally in the industries that we support, such as mining, hydroelectric power generation, forestry and, of course, mass timber.
Another key partner of this partnership and most partnerships that we've been working with here at the STAC is the partnership and involvement with students. We have a program here called the digital fabrication and design program, and a key opportunity in that program is to teach about sustainability, a design for reuse and possibly even the elimination of plastics in some cases.
Another partner we've been working with is Tempus 3D. Tempus is an industrial 3D printing company. The industrial process they use is a powdered material called PA12. Out of each cycle of the print, there is about 5% to 20% of waste plastic that cannot be recycled in its own system. What we've been looking at are opportunities to print that waste. One way is a printer we just purchased that will print that machine's waste for industrial level 3D-printed objects and materials.
Another great partner that we work with is the Kootenay Outdoor Recreation Enterprise. KORE has started a new program called the KORE Re-Hub, and it's all around outdoor gear recycling or circularity. You have a ski boot, and a part breaks on it, and you find out after two years of owning that ski boot that the manufacturer does not make that part anymore and you can't buy it, so what happens to that product? Oftentimes, it gets thrown into the garbage, and you have to go buy a new one. The industry loves that, but we don't. We've been looking at supporting, both through education and producing parts for outdoor gear, that circularity and repairing or reusing those parts in other ways.
The primary key to all of these partnerships is research, but it's also about embedding the circular economy principles and techniques into our curriculum. We've started with our digital fabrication and design program. It will be introduced through our engineering program and many others as a core direction that we would really like to introduce into all curriculum thought processes at the college here.
We believe the environmental and economic benefits these practices will introduce when students are designing for the next big company will be key.