 | |
| 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]
Thermal depolymerization (TDP) is the process of converting a polymer into a monomer or a mixture of monomers, by predominantly thermal means. It may be catalysed or un-catalysed and is distinct from other forms of depolymerisation which may rely on the use of chemicals or biological action. This process is associated with an increase in entropy.
Polymer degradation is the reduction in the physical properties of a polymer, such as strength, caused by changes in its chemical composition. Polymers and particularly plastics are subject to degradation at all stages of their product life cycle, including during their initial processing, use, disposal into the environment and recycling. The rate of this degradation varies significantly; biodegradation can take decades, whereas some industrial processes can completely decompose a polymer in hours.
Plastic shopping bags, carrier bags, or plastic grocery bags are a type of plastic bag used as shopping bags and made from various kinds of plastic. In use by consumers worldwide since the 1960s, these bags are sometimes called single-use bags, referring to carrying items from a store to a home. However, it is rare for bags to be worn out after single use and in the past some retailers incentivised customers to reuse 'single use' bags by offering loyalty points to those doing so. Even after they are no longer used for shopping, reuse for storage or trash is common, and modern plastic shopping bags are increasingly recyclable or compostable. In recent decades, numerous countries have introduced legislation restricting the provision of plastic bags, in a bid to reduce littering and plastic pollution.
Plastic recycling is the processing of plastic waste into other products. Recycling can reduce dependence on landfill, conserve resources and protect the environment from plastic pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Recycling rates lag those of other recoverable materials, such as aluminium, glass and paper. From the start of production through to 2015, the world produced some 6.3 billion tonnes of plastic waste, only 9% of which has been recycled, and only ~1% has been recycled more than once. Of the remaining waste, 12% was incinerated and 79% either sent to landfill or lost into the environment as pollution.
There is no national law in the United States that mandates recycling. State and local governments often introduce their own recycling requirements. In 2014, the recycling/composting rate for municipal solid waste in the U.S. was 34.6%. A number of U.S. states, including California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Oregon, and Vermont have passed laws that establish deposits or refund values on beverage containers while other jurisdictions rely on recycling goals or landfill bans of recyclable materials.
Upcycling, also known as creative reuse, is the process of transforming by-products, waste materials, useless, or unwanted products into new materials or products perceived to be of greater quality, such as artistic value or environmental value.
Commodity plastics or commodity polymers are plastics produced in high volumes for applications where exceptional material properties are not needed. In contrast to engineering plastics, commodity plastics tend to be inexpensive to produce and exhibit relatively weak mechanical properties. Some examples of commodity plastics are polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride, and poly(methyl methacrylate) .Globally, the most widely used thermoplastics include both polypropylene and polyethylene. Products made from commodity plastics include disposable plates, disposable cups, photographic and magnetic tape, clothing, reusable bags, medical trays, and seeding trays.
Disposable food packaging comprises disposable products often found in fast-food restaurants, take-out restaurants and catering establishments. Typical products are foam food containers, plates, bowls, cups, utensils, doilies and tray papers. These products can be made from a number of materials including plastics, paper, bioresins, wood and bamboo.
Plastics are a wide range of synthetic or semi-synthetic materials that use polymers as a main ingredient. Their plasticity makes it possible for plastics to be moulded, extruded or pressed into solid objects of various shapes. This adaptability, plus a wide range of other properties, such as being lightweight, durable, flexible, and inexpensive to produce, has led to its widespread use. Plastics typically are made through human industrial systems. Most modern plastics are derived from fossil fuel-based chemicals like natural gas or petroleum; however, recent industrial methods use variants made from renewable materials, such as corn or cotton derivatives.
Recycling can be carried out on various raw materials. Recycling is an important part of creating more sustainable economies, reducing the cost and environmental impact of raw materials. Not all materials are easily recycled, and processing recyclable into the correct waste stream requires considerable energy. Some particular manufactured goods are not easily separated, unless specially process therefore have unique product-based recycling processes.
Products made from a variety of materials can be recycled using a number of processes.
Plastic pollution is the accumulation of plastic objects and particles in the Earth's environment that adversely affects humans, wildlife and their habitat. Plastics that act as pollutants are categorized by size into micro-, meso-, or macro debris. Plastics are inexpensive and durable, making them very adaptable for different uses; as a result, manufacturers choose to use plastic over other materials. However, the chemical structure of most plastics renders them resistant to many natural processes of degradation and as a result they are slow to degrade. Together, these two factors allow large volumes of plastic to enter the environment as mismanaged waste which persists in the ecosystem and travels throughout food webs.
Dave Hakkens is a Dutch industrial designer. He gained fame with his two graduation projects: Phonebloks, a concept for modular telephones, and Precious Plastic, a movement to develop and promote machines and organizations for plastic recycling. Hakkens is seen by many as an example of a new generation of designers who have set themselves the goal of improving society by sharing knowledge.
Plastic roads are paved roadways that are made partially or entirely from plastic or plastic composites, which is used to replace standard asphalt materials. Most plastic roads make use of plastic waste a portion the asphalt. It is currently unknown how these aggregates will perform in the mid- to long-term, or what effect their degradation might have on surrounding ecosystems.
Adidas Parley is a collection of clothing and footwear originated from the collaboration of German multinational company Adidas and Parley for the Oceans, an organization that addresses environmental threats towards the oceans, through plastic pollution.
China's waste import ban, instated at the end of 2017, prevented foreign inflows of waste products. Starting in early 2018, the government of China, under Operation National Sword, banned the import of several types of waste, including plastics with a contamination level of above 0.05 percent. The ban has greatly affected recycling industries worldwide, as China had been the world's largest importer of waste plastics and processed hard-to-recycle plastics for other countries, especially in the West.
Waste management in South Korea involves waste generation reduction and ensuring maximum recycling of the waste. This includes the appropriate treatment, transport, and disposal of the collected waste. South Korea's Waste Management Law was established in 1986, replacing the Environmental Protection Law (1963) and the Filth and Cleaning Law (1973). This new law aimed to reduce general waste under the waste hierarchy in South Korea. This Waste Management Law imposed a volume-based waste fee system, effective for waste produced by both household and industrial activities.
In Germany and Austria, the term yellow bag refers to a thin, yellowish transparent plastic bag, in which, in the context of local waste disposal, any waste made of plastic, metal or composite materials can be handed in. Depending on the agreement with the cities and municipalities, it may also be possible to use a 'yellow bin'. Yellow bags or yellow bins are part of the Dual System in the German waste management industry.
Waste light concrete (WLC) is a type of light weight concrete where the traditional construction aggregates are replaced by a mix of shredded waste materials and a special group of additives. Used in infrastructure and building construction.
Plastic sequestration is a means of plastic waste management that secures used plastic out of industry and out of the environment into reusable building blocks made by manual compaction. Plastic sequestration is motivated by environmental protection and modeled on the Earth's process of carbon sequestration. Emerging out of the struggle of towns and communities in the Global South to deal with plastic pollution, plastic sequestration compaction methods are characterized by being locally based, non-capital, non-industrial and low-tech. Plastic sequestration is defined by the goals of securing plastic out of the environment and out of high energy/carbon industrial systems. Based on eliminating the chemical and physical and abiotic and biotic degradation pathways, plastic sequestration aims to achieve these goals, by terminally reducing the net surface area of thin film plastics. The building blocks that emerge from plastic sequestration are used in applications that further protect from degradation and permanently keep plastic out of industrial processes, thereby preventing their carbon emissions.
