Jean Luc Lavergne
What do you do with 4 BILLION discarded polyethylene terephthalate (PET) water bottles and 86 million used plastic coat hangers? If you’re Jean Luc, the Canadian poster-child for the circular economy, you work with HP to upcycle them to become over 80,000 tonnes of recycled plastic with equivalent technical and chemical specifications to virgin plastic, and then transformed into 3.8 BILLION HP printer cartridges. And then through further tech wizardry, you put another 3,200 Tonnes of recycled printer plastics into the first-in-class HP printers to be made from closed loop recycled plastic. Included in that total: since 2016, Lavergne has upcycled 8.4 Million plastic bottles from Haiti, many of which would have likely ended up in the ocean, also providing income to people on a devastated island.
