GENBLOX Founding Director Visits HCSREL to Discuss Circular Materials and a Phuket Education Platform
· circular economy, plastic waste, zero waste tourism, education, Phuket
On 23 October 2026, HCSREL hosted April Mei-Ling Porteous, Founding Director of GENBLOX, at NTU Singapore for a discussion on a circular-economy partnership spanning plastic waste, value-added materials and skills education in Phuket.
GENBLOX is a circular materials venture rooted in Phuket, Thailand. It transforms discarded plastic, textile and agricultural waste into new materials for surfaces and creative applications, runs hands-on upcycling experiences in an interactive maker space built for schools, families and corporate teams, and is developing GENBLOX TRACE, a traceability platform that follows materials from collection and processing through to their next application.
The pressure driving the work is specific. Phuket generates roughly 1,400 tonnes of waste a day against an estimated 700 tonnes of daily incineration capacity. Tourism keeps growing; waste infrastructure has not kept pace. GENBLOX's answer is not diversion for its own sake, but new products, new experiences and, in time, new data for the hotels whose guests generate much of the stream. The venture is registered in Singapore and Thailand and is actively seeking hospitality pilot partners on the island.
Three threads of the discussion
- Plastic waste into value-added products — how recovered material becomes a product line rather than a cost line, and what it takes to get from collected feedstock to something a buyer will pay for.
- An education platform in Phuket — the skills layer underneath the materials work: curriculum, training and certification that let local operators, hospitality staff and young people run circular systems rather than simply visit them.
- Zero-waste tourism — making the island's visitor economy the testbed: hotels as pilot partners, guests as participants, material data as the evidence that any of it worked.
The conversation sits at the intersection HCSREL works in: HCSREL is an NTU-based lab building the leaders, knowledge and data-driven tools to accelerate the green and circular economy, on the premise that the transition is a human and institutional problem as much as a technical one.
GENBLOX: genblox.co · @wearegenblox on Instagram. HCSREL hosts visiting researchers, entrepreneurs and practitioners working on skills, circular economy and the green transition. For enquiries, write to team@hcsrel.com.