Truck Lease

To lower the budget, as the bulk of it is the truck, we can lease the truck. Here are a few companies that we can lease the trucks from:

Orix

With Orix, we can lease from them up until we have paid the cost of the truck and then we own the truck. Means the start up costs are lowered. I'm not sure by how much yet.

Fleet Partners

Week 8 feedback from Ant

I think you’re more a social enterprise than anything aren’t you? It’s good to foreground that – that you’re a non-for-profit. You’re not trying to collect the plastic using child labour and then making bricks to build houses out of. So it’s an educational thing that is around leveraging off some of the stuff you’ve found in the regional growth fund. Make that really explicit.

What are you asking for? And are you thinking that these [funds/partners] are the people you would hope would contribute, that you would be pitching for? I can certainly see how you could use companies like MeadowFresh or Fonterra – that might tie into their kind of social responsibility aspect to their strategies. That might be something that you could attach. 

It’s the highest level of funding from anyone that we’ve seen so far. Nearly half of that is for the truck. Finding ways to minimise that, like lease for example might be a good idea. Because the truck itself isn’t important, it’s the contents of the container that is the most important. And then you’ve got the salaries and insurance and things like that, so I would think that basically your salary is going to be the biggest expense, because you have teachers and assistants and technicians. So there are quite a lot of people involved in that so I would have thought that would have been your biggest expense. You’ve got $145,000 for graphic designers – that’s probably going to be a one-off cost, and then there’s $144,000 for the finance department – I’m not quite sure what they’re doing. So get that a bit more nailed down. It feels like it’s a bit all over the place. Do you need to spend $150,000 on renting an office? That’s pretty expensive, when this is the kind of thing that could be based out of a school or an agreement with one of the sponsoring companies, that you might be able to run this from an office or a desk – that’s all you need probably.

Be really explicit about the budget and that it is a social enterprise. And I think if you can quantify the good that is going to come out of it a bit more explicitly. So the schools get those bricks, which is really cool, but is then that just more shit basically? Is it a bit like when schools do a World of Wearable Arts thing and then the week after you see all this junk in the school rubbish. So I think really being able to quantify the value of the plastic, because I think that’s something that’s not happening which also makes me think: yes the school is a component to this, but maybe it’s about working with Fonterra or whatever, and actually showing them that they can close the loop on the cycle and they’ve actually got something that’s worth something with the plastic bottles. So can they build a house from plastic recycled from the HDPE. What can be done with it? More than just making bricks. So put it into a real world scenario so it has real value. Because at the moment yes, it’s an educational thing, but if there’s a demand, if as a company we paid 5 cents a bottle for our milk bottles when we got them back, then we would actually have an income from turning these into playground equipment or whatever that we can sell. Really showing the value of recycled plastic is really important, and in that respect it might be good to have a truck that visits companies as well.

Developing our ideas + Who is doing what?

4 things we need to work on before our next pitch: 

• How its works?
• Visualisation, CAD, Renders, truck (Chris, Ben) 
• Pamphlets, Posters, Video, Website (Bianca and Bella)
• Logistics, timing (1hr?), facts, stats, numbers, specifics 
• (Sarah and Chris)
• More accurate budget 
• Truck Driver, More employees: Educators, Designers. Website, printing, ect. (Bobber) 
• Final Product: development
• What do the schools need?
• Stackable?
• Tooling costs? (Ben, Bobber)
• Post Consumer Ideas
• How do we measure the effect of plastic
• How do we ensure we are having an effect on the kids efforts?
• (Sarah, Bella, Bianca) 

Presentation Prep (Layout + Speaking): Everyone 

Week 8 Pitch (Answering their questions for us to known in week 8) 
— In Week 8 you will present to faculty in informal, closed practice presentations. This is a great opportunity to test the structure and clarity of your idea and pitch. At this pitch you have 6 minutes and the opportunity to use design to help tell your story.

— By Week 8 we expect you to know what your ask is: that is the thing you need from a panel of real investors, interested advocates of start-ups etc. Do you need money? Do you need expertise in something? Do you need legal advice? Do you need partners? Do you need access to more potential users…

·      Getting Investors to pay for the program:

o   WWF and The Tindall Foundation

o   Ministry for the Environment

o   Wellington City Council

o   9Wire 

·      Partnership with Life Education, 9Wire

·      Future Partnerships with local businesses, restaurants/cafes, grow into a national wide program.

·      Expertise on educating school kids + Design for kids 

·      Expertise in animation/videography

Other long  term goals are written on the slide.

— Don’t ask for investment unless you are prepared to show how much of the company you’re offering, what the return will be, etc. Better to ask for support, guidance (etc), unless you have a clear ask.

·      Ask for support/guidance from ‘precious plastics’ with the manufacturing side.

— Potentially your ask could include expressions of interest, building a database of future customers who like what you’re selling.

·      Potential expressing interest in selling the product to retailers?

— Validate and quantify everything. E.g. How do you know this is a problem/opportunity and how large is it? Ask “Who do I need to talk to fully understand this issue?” Then talk to them and use the results to inform/justify your decisions. Do not describe your survey. Tell us about your insights.

·      Email The Provincial Growth Fund (PGF) “will invest in projects to tackle waste in New Zealand, Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones and Associate Environment Minister Eugenie Sage have announced today.”

·      “The funding will be used to invest in projects that convert waste, including plastic waste, into materials and products useful to businesses and consumers,” Shane Jones said. 

·      SUPPORT FOR MORE WAYS OF REDUCING THIS FLOW OF MATERIAL.

·      A high proportion of this waste, particularly recyclable plastic waste, has other uses and can be converted into new products,” 

·      Survey sent out somewhere…..? School, Households ect.

— We'd like to see in this presentation a sense from your team about the longevity of the idea: a road map of sorts. What will happen in 2 weeks, 2 months or 2 years?

·      Create a visual road map of our potential journey

— Now is the time for design / samples / demos / prototypes to be on display: for us to see, feel, taste, touch, experience your ideas: show me. 

·      Design some sort of visual experience of what the set up will look like and how the kids are interacting with the space. In the classroom and the workshop itself.

— Be clear who your target markets are: who is this thing / product / idea for? Narrow it down.

·      It’s for the kids who are starting to figuring out who they are? and how they place themselves in this world, with all the things now and in their future. To educate them about something that was made to be a hero in life but is now the destroyer of life. So changing the perspective on plastic and starting to make the end use less impactful on earth.  

·      Also for the teachers and parents who can start being held responsible  for what they are doing.

— Think about your presentation: who is the best person or people to present? Two people works well, five may not. Presenters should dress and act appropriately.

Who is going to present?

Everyone! 

Truck Ideation

I started developing roughly what the inside of the truck would look like with its shredders and exturders along the far side wall allowing for adequate room for the kids to move about and see what was happening.

Shredder and Extruder Ideation

I started developing an idea of what our interactive tools would look like. Making them both engaging and safe with features like a see through perspex safety barrier so the kids could see the shredding taking place.

Product Brainstorming

As a group we started brainstorming so potential solutions to our problems surrounding what our final product would be. I looked into a range of possibilities before then returning to the group to discuss.