Open-Source Fabbing Gives Plastic Waste New Life

With 3D printing marking the start of a new era of manufacturing, the technology provides the human collective with the opportunity to offset the mistakes associated with centralized mass manufacturing established in the 20th century. Ideas of local distributed production, for instance, could limit the need to ship mass-produced objects from distant locations, thus reducing carbon dioxide emissions and waste associated with maintaining large inventories of identical goods. 3D printing also opens up new possibilities for recycling materials, with a growing number of manufacturers releasing plastic filaments made from used bottles, car dashboards and even chip bags. While this will certainly help transform some of the world’s pollution into useful material, the Precious Plastic project wants to put the power of recycling into the hands of the users themselves with a collection of open-source tools for reusing waste.

From left to right, the extrusion, shredding, injection molding and compression machines from Precious Plastic. (Image courtesy of Precious Plastic.)

Launched by Dave Hakkens in 2013 as his graduate thesis for the Design Academy in the Netherlands, Precious Plastic has seen Hakkens and his team build a series of open-source machines for locally recycling plastic waste. The shredder starts the recycling process, as it chops waste into fine material for use with the subsequent devices. Then, one can transform that material into 3D printer filament with an extrusion machine. Or they can build an injection molding machine for creating small molded objects or a compression machine for compressing the material into larger objects.

A milk jug being shredded into fine flakes by Precious Plastic. (Image courtesy of Precious Plastic.)

All of these systems are completely open source so that anyone with the tools and know-how can begin constructing them at home or, more likely, in their machine shop or garage. In fact, Precious Plastic doesn't have any plans for commercializing any of these devices, though they encourage others to do so as a means of spreading the power of DIY recycling across the world. All of the machines have been designed to be constructed with basic tooling and materials that should be readily available, though they may require a certain level of skill to perform. Precious Plastic has created instructional videos, CAD files, bills of materials and diagrams to help guide users through the process of building the machines, as well as a guide to the various types of plastics one might be able to recycle with them.

The open-source nature of the project also lends itself to evolution initiated by its users. The machines are modular so that, ideally, it would be easy to remove components and replace them, say, to make the compressing machine even taller or the shredder even more powerful. Precious Plastic already has a pretty active forum where users have begun hashing out ideas for improving the designs of the machines and for sharing objects they are working on fabricating. Incidentally, Hakkens also has a forum dedicated to his Phonebloks project, a concept for a modular smartphone that has since been somewhat incorporated into Google’s larger Project Ara initiative.

Various objects made from recycled plastic by Precious Plastic. (Image courtesy of Precious Plastic.)

Given the enthusiasm surrounding Project Ara, particularly when original plans called for the mass 3D printing of the smartphone’s modules, it would certainly be exciting to see similar enthusiasm directed towards Precious Plastic. Imagine the possibilities of converting the approximately eight million tons of plastic that enter the oceans annually into useful material. At the same time, the local manufacturing capabilities advocated by Precious Plastic could also contribute to the previously mentioned reduced greenhouse gas emissions and material waste associated with maintaining stocks of mass-produced goods. All that’s left is for an open-source project like this one to do what the open-source 3D printing movement did: spread like wildfire.