In a workshop in downtown Chang Mai, Thailand, designers turn plastic trash鈥搈ostly plastic bags they collect from the street鈥搃nto聽marble-like coasters and tabletops. In a maker space in Lviv, Ukraine, designers use DIY equipment hacked from old industrial parts and a shopping cart to聽recycle plastic trash into bowls. In Seoul, designers use a聽mobile plastic recycling cart聽for education.
The majority of the 300 million tons of plastic produced every year isn鈥檛 recycled, and recycling that does happen typically happens at an industrial scale in factories using equipment that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. But a growing number of designers are using a set of聽open-source, easy-to-build tools to recycle plastic and manufacture new plastic products on their own.
鈥淲e want to make small-scale plastic recycling accessible to everyone, as this can have an exponential effect on the amount of plastic recycled鈥揺ventually reducing the demand for new virgin plastic鈥揳nd educate millions of people on plastic, plastic recycling, and how to handle it before it ends up in the environment,鈥� says Dave Hakkens, the Dutch founder of聽Precious Plastic, an organization that designed the machines now in use by the designers in Thailand and the Ukraine, and more than 200 others.
One set of instructions explains how to build a low-cost machine that shreds plastic into flakes. Another modular machine extrudes plastic that can be used for 3D printing; an injection machine and a compression machine can form plastic into molds. A series of videos explain how to build the machines using basic materials and universal parts.
Designers around the world began using the machines to make recycled plastic products in 2016, and the organization is now sharing new instructions for building full recycling workshops聽inside shipping containers. They鈥檝e also created a聽new map聽to connect people in the DIY recycling community.
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