 | |
| Formation | 2013 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Dave Hakkens |
| Location | |
Region | Worldwide |
| Website | preciousplastic |
Precious Plastic is an open hardware plastic recycling project and is a type of open source digital commons project. The project was started in 2013 by Dave Hakkens and is now in its fourth iteration. It relies on a series of machines and tools which grind, melt, and inject recycled plastic, allowing for the creation of new products out of recycled plastic on a small scale.
In 2012, Dave Hakkens started working on Precious Plastic as a part of his studies at the Design Academy in Eindhoven. [1] The project was released in 2013 as Version 1.0. [1]
The work on version 2 was started in 2015 [1] and was released in March 2016. [1] [2] In 2016, Precious Plastic also created a marketplace called Bazar for selling machines and products targeted to DIY designers to recycle plastic. [3]
The team started working on version 3.0 from early 2017 and was launched in October 2017. [1]
In May 2018, Precious Plastic received the Famae award of €300,000 to further develop the project. [4] The city of Eindhoven also provided them a big workspace free of charge. [4] In October 2018, Precious Plastic project officially opened its doors at the VDMA building in Eindhoven. [5] The work on Version 4.0 was started in September 2018. [6] [1]
In 2019 Hakkens and Precious Plastic were involved in disagreement over whether to burn or recycle plastics collected from the oceans. [7]
The version 4, which includes business models and starter kits for creating recycling systems, was announced in January 2020. [6] [1]
In December 2020, One Army was launched as an umbrella organization for a growing collection of projects including Precious Plastic, Project Kamp, PhoneBloks, Fixing Fashion, and Story Hopper. [8] [9]
Precious Plastic is an open hardware plastic recycling project and is a type of open source digital commons project. [12] It relies on a series of machines and tools which grind, melt, and inject recycled plastic, allowing for the creation of new products out of recycled plastic on a small scale. [13] The project allows individual consumers to set up "their own miniature recycling company". [14]
The project is composed of more than 40,000 people [15] in over 400 work spaces, either remotely or on site in the Netherlands. [16] [17] [3] All the information produced by the project such as codes, drawings, and source materials are available for free online under the Creative Commons Attribution - Share Alike International 4.0 license. [12]
Precious Plastic Fiji was formed in 2017 as a NGO dedicated to eliminating plastic waste. [18]
In 2018 after a workshop in China, a company, Plastplan, grew out of the Precious Plastic project in Iceland to promote an alternative to shipping plastic to Sweden to be burned for electricity. [19] [20]
In Hawaii in 2019, Puna Precious Plastic, with more than 1,000 members as a part of the Precious Plastic worldwide movement, collected about 1,000 pounds, which it planned to sort, shred and melt into plastic bricks and lumber for construction. [21] [22] [23]
In Thailand, Precious Plastic Bangkok collects plastic bottle caps to shred, melt, and reshape into new products, including monk's robes. [24] [25]
With a grant from Dane County Arts and partnered with Community GroundWorks, the nonprofit that oversees Troy Kids’ Garden, and hackerspace Sector 67, a branch of Precious Plastic was launched in Madison, Wisconsin. [26]
In September 2021, One Army announced a "Verified" Precious Plastic workspaces program to give recognition to "high quality recycling work". Many locations around the world were listed. [27]
In 2018, a group called Precious Plastic Texas was formed by students at the University of Texas after learning about what was being done in Thailand. [28] In 2019 students in the Environmental Fellows Program's gateway seminar at DePauw University in Indiana began work on a Precious Plastic project, and received funding from the Joseph and Carol Danks Centers Council Fund for Multidisciplinary Projects. The project will continue in a gateway seminar and three art classes, and they may add an off-campus trip to a Precious Plastic site. [29] In Australia, UNSW business school students, working closely with Precious Plastic, won the 2019 Big Idea competition in the postgraduate category with their start-up idea called Closed Loop – a local-level plastic waste recycling business. [30] Engineering students at the Monash University chapter created a Precious Plastic one-metre cube portable recycling machine to transport to events for display. [31]
