Precious Plastic

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]

Precious Plastic is an open hardware plastic recycling project and is a type of open source digital commons project.[8] 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.[9] The project allows individual consumers to set up "their own miniature recycling company".[10]

The project is composed of more than 40,000 people[11] in over 400 work spaces, either remotely or on site in the Netherlands.[12][13][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.[8]

Precious Plastic Fiji was formed in 2017 as a NGO dedicated to eliminating plastic waste.[14]

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.[15][16]

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.[17][18][19]

In Thailand, Precious Plastic Bangkok collects plastic bottle caps to shred, melt, and reshape into new products, including monk's robes.[20][21]

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.[22]

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.[23] 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.[24] 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.[25] Engineering students at the Monash University chapter created a Precious Plastic one-metre cube portable recycling machine to transport to events for display.[26]

• Official website