RS Components supports Practical Action’s ‘Pumpkins Against Poverty’ appeal with 3D printed pumpkin

RS Components (RS), the trading brand of Electrocomponents, the global distributor for engineers, is supporting the international development charity, Practical Action, and its ‘Pumpkins Against Poverty’ appeal, by designing a pumpkin with DesignSpark Mechanical to raise awareness of the initiative. The 3D printed file can be shared in time for Halloween, so that anyone can 3D print one and add an LED to illuminate it.

Every year 18,000 tonnes of pumpkins are thrown away in the UK after being carved for Halloween*. In Bangladesh, 160 million people still live in extreme poverty, on less than £1 a day; and on the banks of massive rivers which drain meltwater and rain from the Himalayas, people have lost their land to river erosion. Moreover, climate change is causing devastating floods to become ever more regular, with more families losing their possessions year after year.

Practical Action has come up with a clever way of using pumpkins to feed families and supplement their income by using sandbars which emerge from rivers as flood waters recede. Previously, this land was considered barren and unusable, but through new growing techniques and training, people with no land of their own are able to grow up to 600 pumpkins a year, eating what they need and selling the excess to enable them to send their children to school, buy livestock and other foodstuffs.

“At RS, we’ve been supporting engineers for over 75 years, and last December we made friends with Practical Action when we ran a Power Hack – Hackathon at the Google offices in London,” said Pete Wood, Community Manager at DesignSpark. “What we love about these guys is that they utilise technology to find practical solutions to improve the lives of poverty stricken communities around the world. When we heard about their latest project in Bangladesh, Pumpkins Against Poverty, we were keen to get involved.”

So far 120,000 people have benefited from Practical Action’s Pumpkins Against Poverty project. Moreover, the UK Government is backing this appeal by matching every pound raised, meaning all donations will have double the impact. Since the appeal is not a tech project, RS is helping to raise awareness of this worthwhile initiative with the help of its DesignSpark Mechanical 3D CAD tool.

To create your own Halloween pumpkin you can view the brief in Designshare or Thingiverse. For further details or to learn how to make a donation please visit Pete’s blog on DesignSpark.