Plastic Microrecycling Goes Viral

Hundreds of Precious Plastic workshops worldwide convert waste into products and profits

Welcome to the latest issue of Decent Tuesdays, a new, experimental edition of The Main Street Journal that covers and connects the many aspects of decentralization.

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Most used plastic winds up in landfills, the ocean, or the landscape, where it kills wildlife or degrades and puts toxins and microplastics into the environment. And plastic put in recycling bins often isn’t recycled— sometimes it’s shipped from rich countries to poor countries and surreptitiously burned as fuel, creating and spreading even more toxins. Some researchers characterize the global trade in plastic waste as a new form of colonialism.

But a worldwide network of microrecyclers is turning local plastic waste into commercial products, while building community and expertise. The 10-year-old Precious Plastic movement encompasses hundreds of workspaces, ranging from Precious Plastic Gambia, which culls plastic pollution from tropical beaches in Africa, to Yukon Plastics, which commercializes waste plastic donated by businesses in northern Canada. One affiliate, Robries in Indonesia, has 20 full-time employees and serves clients worldwide. That’s not local, it’s true, but it’s still cool.

These recycled plastic businesses are generally more viable as primary sources of income in lower-income countries, and are money-making hobbies in pricier areas, but the shared innovation over DIY plastic recycling crosses all borders, and Precious Plastic shops in all sorts of countries are assisted by grants for economic development, environmental protection, hands-on education, and other good causes.

The basic equipment that the Precious Plastic shops use— shredders, presses, extruders, injection molders— are all open-source designs that the global community builds, improves on, and shares, although some locations also use commercial equipment. Products that the shops make and sell range from buttons, combs, and flowerpots to bricks, beams, and large sheets used in furniture and construction.

My local shop, Peninsula Precious Plastics, was started by David Schick (the primary source for this piece) and his wife and son. It’s a happening place. Among other things, it’s where a local designer shreds prescription pill bottles and molds them into Cocoplum sunglasses frames, and where an 8th grader recently started turning broken, discarded pickleballs into dry-erase boards favored by her A.P. Environmental Sciences teacher. The location also collects plastic from and hosts groups from ServiceNow, which supports Precious Plastic shops located near its four main offices, as a way to give back to their communities.

The Peninsula shop’s setup includes several open-source machines, plus a commercial granulator, flatbed CNC, and a cold press that makes sheets smoother and uniform after they come out of the hot press. For safety (and convenience), they also have HEPA fume extractors, a downdraft table, masks, and a PlasTell spectroscope that identifies types of plastic without your having to test what temperatures they melt and smoke at. To minimize creating microplastics, they only use blades and planes to remove excess plastic, never files or sandpaper.

Precious Plastic’s origin story starts with Dutch industrial designer Dave Hakkens, who learned how little plastic is recycled, and that it’s only done at an industrial scale. He started trying to create smaller machines that anyone, anywhere could build in order to turn waste plastic into a useful and valuable resource, and some engineers joined the effort. They published and promoted their open-source designs, supported them with how-to information and online community tools, and Precious Plastic shops have been sprouting up ever since.

Last month, Hakkens announced the Precious Plastic v5 effort to expand in several ways, including by developing a plastic credits system similar to how carbon credits currently work. Backed by standards and a verification trust chain, such a market would let small plastic recyclers label their products with statements like “This product offsets 3.7 kg of new plastic” while earning additional income from foundations, government agencies, or companies that want to buy recycled plastic offsets. The v5 expansion also includes plans to research viable substitutes for plastic, such as mushroom-, seaweed-, and bamboo-based materials.

So, are you looking for a new source of income that’s creative, and hands-on with something other than a keyboard or a steering wheel? As one of the Dustin Hoffman character’s parents’ friends tells him in The Graduate (1967), I have one word for you: Plastics.

Photo Credit: Museum of Space Available (MOSA)

NEWS

MEDIA

• Funding Non-Traditional News Sources and Creators for Impact, The Lenfest Institute for Journalism (September 24)

  • Supporting local news means funding both traditional journalism sources and other sources of local information, such as city government departments, libraries, churches, and individuals— for example, as listed by the Colorado News Mapping Project. To learn who those trusted sources are, funders need to spend time talking with people in the area.

FOOD

• Innovative Food Systems Involving Edible Insects, chapter in Indigenous Insights for Planetary Health and Sustainable Food Systems (August 2025)

  • Promoting edible insects, long recognized as a low-impact protein source, can draw on indigenous cuisines, like how Kitu-Kara in and around Quito, Ecuador, eat red and white catzo beetles during their annual swarming period, including in Uchucota, a traditional Day of the Dead dish. But appreciating these ingredients’ cultural contexts should not turn them into luxury products.

MAKING

• These Residents Built a $10,000 Bike Lane in Atlanta, Next City (September 24)

  • Atlanta’s Tactical Urbanism program invites residents to propose experimental changes to public infrastructure and build them temporarily. If the changes work out for one year, the city makes them permanent. The 20th proposal approved is a protected, 2-way bike lane linking Virginia Highland Elementary and Midtown High School across the city’s beltway trail.

ENERGY

• Canadian Worker Co-op Helps Communities Design and Implement Climate Action Strategies, Co-op News (September 29)

  • Hundreds of cities across North America have hired a Canadian worker-owned co-op, Sustainability Solutions Group (SSG), to help develop their climate action plans. Their modeling tool ScenaCommunity helps city planners by projecting future expected emissions, energy usage, costs to residents, and operational impacts based on different energy policy scenarios.

FINANCE

• Connecticut Green Bank’s Bond Financing for Green Infrastructure and Home Solar, ImpactAlpha (September 29)

  • Connecticut Green Bank is offering new Green Liberty Bonds that finance residential solar installations in the state, paid back by generated energy credits sold to utilities. The semi-public bank is also selling a new round of its shorter-term, lower-cost Green Liberty Notes.

GOVERNANCE

• United Kingdom’s Pride in Place Initiative, Policies for Places (September 28)

  • The UK’s 2022 “Levelling-Up” program aimed to revitalize deprived areas of the country with a top-down, scattershot approach based on soliciting bids for grants. The new Pride of Place Initiative uses a better approach: it allocates funds to all neighborhoods identified statistically as disadvantaged, and trusts local leaders and communities to apply them towards development.

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