A Pella alum has been working to take recycled plastic cleaned from the ocean and turn it into 3D printable material.
Chris Moriarity, a class of 1999 graduate of Pella High School, now living in the Pacific Northwest, is the co-founder of the Million Waves Project with his wife Laura, and the idea came to him as he was thinking late one night.
“I had been reading a lot about ocean plastics and I had been reading a lot about what people are doing with 3D printing and all kinds cool things, and all the sudden it just kind of struck me–why isn’t somebody putting these two things together?,” he recalls.
Moriarity tells KNIA/KRLS News he was inspired to find a way to transform a portion of the estimated 28 billion pounds of plastic dumped into the world’s oceans each year into something useful and practical–in this case, prosthetic limbs created from a 3D printer, which are then given to those in need.
“At first, we were making phone calls and surfing the internet and we found so many helpful people that helped us put our process together,” he says. “It only takes 30 water bottles to make a [prosthetic] hand. So for the longest time, we literally just did that–on Saturday mornings, we would get up as a family and we would go collect what we could, bring it back to the garage, cut it up with a pair of scissors, process it, and that was that.”
“We’re now finally evolving into a real deal production line and we are able to help a ton of people.”
He says a lot of the inspiration he has for the project and how it works comes from growing up in the Tulip City.
“Pella is one of those towns that you cared a lot about your community,” Moriarity says. “It’s one of the first complements that anybody gives when they come through Pella is how clean it is. Now when you take pride in something and you are proud of where you’re from, you naturally want to take care of it.”
“So I got those roots and those morals and values from those very streets. So when I came near the ocean, it just became my new surrogate home, but I wanted to take care of it just like the people of Pella take care of their community.”
Read more at their official website.