Precious Plastic
Open source recycling machines, products, and online tools to empower anyone to start recycling plastic locally.
Open source recycling machines, products, and online tools to empower anyone to start recycling plastic locally.
The alternative plastic recycling system run by thousands of people around the world using knowledge that are shared free and open source online.
Plastic waste is damaging ecosystems around the planet. To date, still less than 10% of all plastic is recycled and production is planned to triple by 2040.
Precious Plastic provides people the tools, platforms and knowledge to recycle plastic waste locally, around the world.
We want to increase the amount of plastic that is recycled around the world. To do this we empower tens of thousands of people around the world with everything they need to start recycle plastic locally.
We develop machines to recycle plastic and share how to replicate them open source online, for free. So everyone can rebuild them and start recycling in their neighbourhood transforming plastic waste into valuable products.
We also provide business tools to help run a business from recycling plastic. People can buy & sell these recycled products, machines and parts on the Precious Plastic Bazar (our marketplace).
By now, there is a big global community that sees plastic as a precious material.
Precious Plastic design and develops machines to recycle plastic. These machines are then open sourced and shared online for free so that anyone can replicate them and help to recycle more plastic. So far we've made 7 machines for various needs and outputs. You can learn more here.
We share techniques and guides on how to craft plastic waste into beautiful and valuable products. People in our community learn, replicate, iterate and share back improvements in a constant feedback loop that advances this emergent craft.
The Precious Plastic Bazar is the marketplace for plastic recycling where people can buy and sell machines, parts and recycled products. The Bazar helps people to generate an income, fuelling local economies around recycling plastic. In 2020 the Bazar processed 200K€, these are money going straight to the recyclers.
The Community Platform is the digital place where the Precious Plastic community meets and collaborates globally. The tool includes a map, the academy, the how-to guides and events page. It currently helps 10K recycling entrepreneurs to connect and collaborate.
More than 500 workspaces and tens of thousands of people around the planet use Precious Plastic to recycle plastic, educate communities and tackle the plastic waste problem.
To learn more visit Precious Plastic Global Impact Survey
We came quite far in building a global community of plastic recyclers. But this isn’t enough. There is still a big problem our there, we need more people recycling and taking care of our plastic.
And this means.. more work ahead for Precious Plastic! Our team is daily carrying out more research, improving out solutions and innovating recycling.
If you want to help out you can either start recycling with Precious Plastic or make a donation so we can continue to do this free & open source. Or do both :)
