Taller Esfèrica was born when three friends, Oscar, Marc and Aniol got together to rethink the way we create and consume products in today’s society. After studying Industrial Design Engineering we realised that we didn’t want to spend our lives creating more products for the taking-making-throwing way of consuming. We thought that as designers we could have an incidence on both how people consume and how products are designed. As nature does, we wanted to create industrial processes with infinite closed-loop cycles. Therefore, creating reusable, modular, upgradeable, disassemblable, reparable, durable and, finally, recyclable products.

In order to achieve this, we started designing a service where people could recycle and reuse materials to create products themselves, locally. The place will allow users to have access to waste material, possibility to share designs with each other, access to recycling machines and some other features. The concept is similar to that of a FabLab, but taking into account the closed loop material flow as a main goal.

What we have just described is our final goal, but to get there we needed to start smaller. We decided to start working with plastic, due to the huge problem this material’s humongous quantities of waste is causing. At that point, we got to the conclusion that Precious Plastic machines would fit perfectly our needs. This was back in 2015 when V1 was out.

Big up the early adopters 🙌

In order to reach our final goal, we decided to go step-by-step and started doing itinerant workshops where participants could see and experiment the cycle of plastics and also understand how to design products that do not generate waste.

The project has been self-funded with very little income, but with a lot of great help and collaborations. Joan Bordas, a friend that has been working with steel for 50 years, helped us to build the machine in his workshop. The Pot Filtrar molds were also made there with a manual lathe.

At Precious Plastic we strive to push for a collaborative philosophy, we love to see this extending to our community !

Our goal is to be able to make a small production of products out of plastic waste, locally. Also to let people participate and experiment with this material, and explain how all products can be designed using the principles of circularity.

We see ourselves having a physical space where people can bring their plastic waste, transforming it into products themselves, and take those products home. If the product breaks or the users don’t want it anymore they can bring it back to the workspace and process its materials again.

So far, we have done a water filter, a key chain/pot and we are currently working on the design of sunglasses.

Amongst other difficulties, we often found it hard to know what the plastic we are using might contain. Even if you know the type of plastic you are processing, it might have some additives to improve their physical properties and some will probably be toxic.

Another obstacle related to the injection machine is the mould fabrication. The best materials to make moulds are metals like aluminium or steel and it is difficult to have access to machines that can process this material.

Well, it might be difficult but you guys did an amazing job so far 👊

We remember very well the first time that we injected properly a piece into the first mould. First it was with PLA, which is more fluid and therefore easier to inject. Later we managed to inject PP, LDPE and even HDPE. Also another great success was when we did the first workshop. That day felt like the project was being born.

Eventually, every time that we have tried a new feature of the machine or moulds and worked out well it was a big success for us.

One last message to our Precious Plastic community:
“Changing the way we produce and consume is in our hands!”

Make sure to follow Taller Esferica’s progress on facebook or on their website

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