For example, as it stands now, we could never ship our ceramic water filters the same way we shipped our plastic buckets. In fact, we spent an afternoon in Mandalay searching for the best way to ship our ceramic filters without breaking them, and it proved yet another lesson of how little is wasted in Myanmar.

Before setting out we thought of the most likely shipping option out of our Sagaing factory that would work for the largest part of the region. While we were tempted to use water transport (the Ayeyarwady river flows through Sagaing), we realized that would most likely merely delay our logistics issues until the ceramic filters reached shore, and then we’d still have the problem of shipping them to their final destination intact. Thinking about how our Ayeyarwady Delta area factories ship, we decided to explore the option of using scraps of rubber from shoe-manufacturing to set between the filters and prevent them from shattering as they traveled over potholed roads.

Our first stop was a combination shoe-factory and shoe-assembler’s wholesale shop. Clearly we were not the first to think of an alternate use for the rubber scraps that remained after shoes were cut out of them. A dozen 60-pound footlocker-sized blocks of the compressed scraps were stacked haphazardly around the store. With approximately 3.6 pounds in a viss, and each viss selling for 5300 kyat, each block was worth around 88,000 kyat, or $125. This store sold them and also sent to China for recycling into tires, toys, and more. So, while the shoes were assembled there, at the same time they were whole-selling every ingredient needed for every step of the production process: the glue for the soles and footbed, the leather for covering the footbed and crafting the strap, the fiberboard for placing between the sole and footbed, the cardboard boxes for packaging the shoes for shipment, and even the plastic string for wrapping up the boxes.  They were kind enough to give us samples of their stamp-outlines to test out for ourselves, and so we added it to our list of options and were on our way.

Our next stop was a recycled tire workshop, where we hoped to scope out the option of using scraps of worn-out tires as our shock-absorption material. The variety of goods they manufactured with recycled tires was impressive, and their specialty was containers of all different sizes and shapes (though they also had several fashions of shoes on offer).  Although another possible option, the unreliable supply of tires makes assembling a reliable supply chain challenging as one would not want to be kept from shipping by there not having been enough flat tires in the past month to assemble the needed tire scraps to insure safe transport.

A final option we considered was somehow incorporating defective cigarettes into our solution. Advantageous for their largely unusable nature (they aren’t as valued for repurposing as tires or shoe-rubber, for example), we were hard-pressed to think of a cost-effective way to transform them into a form capable of protecting the filters.  Thus, although we’ve gone from no options to many in the course of one afternoon, we still have much thinking to do before we settle on our preferred method.