return on investment

TybeeCleanBeach is a 501c3 nonprofit. As the title suggests, we don't make a profit of any sort. But this doesn't mean we don't want to make any money.

​​All the income we generate- primarily through our plastic recycling projects- is put back into the organization and spent on any number of things, like more grabbers for our beach cleanups, or maintenance on our old prisoner transport van that we use to store the equipment. More money equals more impact, and we want to have as much impact as we can. Tim, Chantal and I are all very careful with money, and we want to maximize return on investment. One of our big expenses- and this is my main area of interest- is additional recycling equipment. We are very limited in terms of space, so that pretty much rules out anything big, like a sheetpress machine. But we could always use new molds.
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​Any plastic recycling effort has to have molds in order to make anything. We spend a large amount of time trying to think of new products to sell, and if we can somehow come up with the molds to make them. Our two injection machines, being essentially DIY homebrewed affairs, are pretty limited. The pressures that we can generate are quite low, as are the volumes of plastic that we can melt at a given time. Since our goal is to keep plastic out of the landfill, we make items that are thicker and more durable than the thin, flimsy, "throwaway" plastic items that they're made from. This means relatively small items, at least for now.

But even the relatively crude low-pressure molds that we use are expensive. The best ones we have come from the folks at Sustainable Design Studios. They either have or know someone with a very nice CNC machine, since these are custom made from big blocks of aluminum, have a very nice surface finish, and produce very nice parts.

This brings up the idea of ROI- Return On Investment. There's a clear limit to what we can charge for our recycled plastic do-dads, and it isn't a large amount. If you spend $400 for a mold, then you need to make around a hundred sales before you start to break even, just on the cost of the mold. If the mold cost is six or seven hundred dollars, you're looking at a lot of sales. This is why we spend so much time thinking about molds, mold design, and the things that we want to make.