Berkeley student makes face shields for Uganda health workers

• I always had this desire that I wanted to work in developing countries. And I also loves engineering and designing, and making things. But I struggled for a long time to figure out exactly how you could bring those two together, engineering and working in developing countries that would actually be helpful in a way and not actually cause more harm in development projects. And now, through Takataka plastics, I feel like I found those answers. And so that is really exciting and really gratifying.

00:37 - I feel like I am doing the purpose that I was called to in life. Our goal is to locally transform plastic waste into quality and affordable construction materials like these wall tiles. So, these can be put in people’s bathrooms or kitchens, and we can make them stronger and cheaper than a ceramic tiles currently on the market. When we heard that the hospitals were lacking protective equipment for the doctors and nurses, that they had no face shields, we’re like, oh, face shields. They’re made from plastic. That’s what we do. Maybe we can help here. So, we went to our workshop and started just experimenting with all different kinds of recycled plastic materials and other things that we could find to try to make face shields. This is one of them.

01:31 - Indicative the doctors and nurses at a clinic and tells them and they were really excited about the idea of having a face shield. And they took like one guy even said, he didn’t even want to take it off. It was actually protecting him a lot. He did a procedure where pus came up and sprayed him in the face. And so he was really thankful that he was wearing the face shield, cause it protected him. Personally, I like being with my family right now is always ringing in the back of my mind.

02:04 - But I think that being here in Uganda, and being able to help solve this need of protective equipment for the doctors that don’t have any, it’s exactly what I’ve been called to do. So, thankful that we’re able to have the team and the resources to be able to do that. And hopefully we can be able to do more. So, this is our workshop where we make the tiles. These are our prototype machines that we built. This is the shredder that we use for chopping the plastic into really small flakes. And then over here is the extruder.

02:50 - We take the chop flakes, we put it in the hopper, and then it gets extruded and pushed and melted. Out the ends, we put it into molds. .