Pick the right plastic off a refuse tip, then shred, melt and convert it into feedstock for 3D printers – it’s a living for some of India’s poorest people WITH her small child in tow, a young woman trudges across the hazardous clutter of a vast, dusty rubbish dump in Pune, India, scanning for scrap to sell. This scene comes from the launch video of a social enterprise called Protoprint, but it is played out at waste dumps in developing nations across the world. Some 15 million people are thought to scavenge for saleable refuse. Protoprint’s scheme could soon improve the lives of some of these people.

The group’s aim is to train local pickers in Pune to collect high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic waste and then show them how to shred, melt and convert that plastic into the strands of filament that are the feedstock for one of the world’s burgeoning technology industries: 3D printing. It might sound a small market, but the idea has enough potential that a non-governmental organisation called TechForTrade in London is already establishing an ethics body to ensure it doesn’t lead to exploitation of the waste-pickers by, say, companies or gangs, the group told a conference in Nottingham, UK, last week.

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