Innovate Waste Challenge Winner!

 

Praxis Plastics, as a team of me (Tyler Linner) as founder, Darren Bingham as business outreach coordinator, and Fran Alvarado as public relations coordinator, are ecstatic to announce that we've won $8,000 through the City of Flagstaff and NACET's Innovate Waste Challenge.
 

To get this support of our city and its business incubator partner, we were invited to many "launch and learn" seminars since last fall, submitted a written proposal including business plan, and finally 'pitched' the project to a panel of four judges.

Thankfully our plastic recycling business pitch won out over two competitors! We will be working closely with NACET (Flagstaff's business incubator space) going forward to tackle the transition from thesis project to local manufacturing business. NACET thankfully offers incubator workspaces for businesses, so we are looking at funding sources for that and other important factors.

Watch this space as we progress. I'm aiming to grow this into a major producer of plastic items for Northern Arizona! It's a tall order but a lot of people are rooting for us. For instance, we plan to use the Innovate Waste funding to acquire an industrial-scale shredder and injection molder so that we can dramatically up our productivity and offer competitive prices. We are talking with other local businesses to secure both clean plastic waste streams and to find a workable product idea that we can jump into production with as soon as possible.