Precious Plastic

Open Design Communities

by Joseph Klatt

What is Precious Plastic?

Precious Plastic is an open source project to boost plastic recycling. We design plastic recycling machines, techniques, and digital tools so that anyone can start their own plastic recycling workspace anywhere in the world.

Our mission is to (re)valorise plastic so we can eliminate its waste altogether, create local circular economies, and educate people about the plastic waste problem. While traditional centralized recycling systems require massive investments and access to high tech machinery that’s inaccessible for much of the world, we provide DIY recycling machines, techniques, and knowledge to turn plastic waste into new valuable products using universal materials and basic tools. The blueprints of our designs are published for free open source online and come with a detailed set of 40 instruction videos, guidebooks, and all the other necessary knowledge for people to create a fully functional plastic recycling workspace, including plastic types, collection, product design, product creation, and finishing techniques.

Precious Plastics and Distributed Design: Plastic for Good Challenge

Our machines and methodologies provide a production system that starkly contrasts the mass production of virgin plastic and its associated environmental degradation. Through local collection and low-volume craft production, participants witness their plastic waste transformed into beautiful new products, which rejects detached consumption and disposal in favor of a participatory act of creating an alternative future without waste.

Our Community

Since the project’s inception in 2013, the community has grown to more than 350 known Precious Plastic workspaces globally using Precious Plastic machines to recycle plastic waste locally. Our online discussion forum has 70,000+ members contributing questions, hacks, tips, and resources related to running a plastic recycling workspace. Our online map has more than 12,000 pins from people offering their skills, hoping to collaborate with others. This community, on and offline, is the key to our success.

We chose to invest heavily in creating a community around Precious Plastic because plastic waste is everywhere, and the benefit of open source projects is that everyone can start working on a problem together and share successes and failures. The plastic waste problem isn’t going to be solved with just one solution - every setting is different, every country is different and every culture is different. Open source communities create the best solutions through local ways of customization, hacks, or plug-ins, and help you get close to the problem in a quick, scalable way. You also build a strong foundation of people collaborating together, which is more sustainable in the long run than relying on one centralized organization to develop solutions.

There are two main ways that the Precious Plastic community collaborates with one another - online forums and the Precious Plastic Map. Our online forum allows people from all over the world ask questions to the community, share their experiences, and lead new areas of research and development. The Precious Plastic map allows people to find and connect with others locally so that they can start a local group or new Precious Plastic workspace. A way to connect locally is the key to empowering people to find local solutions.

One of the toughest challenges for open source projects, especially hardware projects, is how do you share back high quality information (new designs, techniques, learnings) from the community in an organized way. Within our community we’ve experienced people wanting and willing to share information they’ve developed locally, but we don’t have a clear channel or place for it. That’s why we are working on developing a documentation tool that will enable community members to upload specific products, machines, techniques, or other “How tos” so that other people can utilize them. This will serve as a repository of information from both the Precious Plastic core team and Precious Plastic workspaces from around the world.

What’s next?

We’ve built a huge community and infrastructure around solutions to the plastic waste problem, but many of the Precious Plastic projects around the world are geared towards educational initiatives or small community projects. Precious Plastic version 4, soon to be released, has a focus on scaling our network up in impact through three new “semi-industrial” machines (shredder, extrusion, and sheet press) that will enable Precious Plastic workspaces to significantly increase the amount of material they are recycling. These machines, along with our new digital tools and business models, will help people more easily start a small plastic recycling business and sustain themselves financially. We envision our a robust regional or city network of small businesses working together to recycle plastic and produce new valuable products. Each Precious Plastic workspace within the network will specialize in one part of the process from collection, shredding, production, and sales, with each adding value to the material. This model contrasts to previous versions of Precious Plastic, which focused on having an all-in-one workspace. The shift in design occurred as a result of learning from the most successful workspaces in our community.

Follow us at https://preciousplastic.com/ for updates on Version 4.