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Are you interested in plastic recycling and reuse?

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Our summary today works with the report titled Global survey of Precious Plastic Projects: A summary of findings from 2020 by Dr Wouter Spekkink, Dr Malte Rödl, and Professor Martin Charter, supported by the Precious Plastic Team and the Sustainable Consumption Institute of University of Manchester. Precious Plastic was a previous endeavour of our next interviewee, Dave Hakkens in episode 111. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how a grassroots movement like Precious Plastic can create a community with active users and projects. This report presents the projects and workspaces connected to Precious Plastic through the analysis of user questionnaires.

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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper. Stay tuned until because I will give you the 3 most important things and some questions which would be interesting to discuss with a special attention to Australian cities.

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In recent years, we have witnessed various initiatives that encourage the reuse, recycling and reduced use of resources and products, to create circular economies. Alongside policy and business-driven initiatives, we find citizen-driven initiatives that have developed from the grassroots, and Precious Plastic is an important example of this.

The original version of the Precious plastic concept was developed in 2012 by Dave Hakkens as part of his graduation project. He noticed at the time that our societies produce large amounts of plastic each year but only about 10% of that is recycled. He wanted to design small-scale plastic recycling machines that people can use to recycle plastics themselves, locally. Dave initially designed three types of machines: an extrusion, an injection and a compression machine, which he presented in 2013 during his graduation show. From the very beginning, he took an open source approach to his work, sharing technical drawings online to encourage others to build the machines themselves. After the lack of initial interest, Dave decided that the concept needed to be further developed in order to get more people mobilized.

In 2015, he created a group and they together started to work on the version 2 of the Precious Plastic concept. They improved and completed the machines, developed ideas for products that can be produced from recycled plastics. The team shared their journey with trial and error and knowledge via online education materials, videos and an improved website. These efforts led to a broader uptake of the Previous Plastic concept and the machines started popping up in various countries across the globe. In 2017, version 3 was launched.

At this time, the team invited people to support their efforts either with donations or work experiences. The broadened team came up with an open source design for a Precious Plastic workspace that can be established anywhere in the world. To further increase engagement, the team also created an online map for people worldwide working on some projects under the Previous Plastic flag. All knowledge and journey were documented online and community members were also able to share their own experiences and improvements. The team finally created the online Bazar where people can sell and buy machines, parts and products.

The 2018 version revolves around the development of the so-called Precious Plastic universe with more people collaborating in one bigger, industrialised version of the machine, with more ideas for products and processes, and with more help around individual business developments. With these efforts, the team created blueprints for machines, floor plans for different kinds of workspaces, instruction videos, graphics materials, and others.

The authors created a survey to understand how the community engages with the Precious Plastic team, what kind of projects they are working on, and how the operational workspaces work. The survey included questions regarding location, founding, projects, revenues, structures, goals of projects, where the plastic comes from, and the future of the individual projects, and received 48 responses from the reached out 216.

The authors saw a remarkable variety in the characteristics of the projects. For example, even though the majority of the initiatives appear to be informally organised, set up at home, there are also small commercial businesses, educational projects, artist projects and non-profit organisations. Most of the initiatives are staffed with volunteers, but there are also some using paid staff. The motivations vary as well, though the environmental motivations are most common. The variety is also present in location, proving that the Previous Plastic community is truly global from 29 countries which is remarkable given that the first steps were taken only in 2012.

This shows that the Precious Plastic concept has been highly successful at what the literature on grassroots innovations refers to as replication. This could be partly thanks to the relative ease with which the concept is integrated into different kinds of initiatives. The diversity of the projects is remarkable. The success is also a result of the central team and their dedication and success in attracting further funding. The knowledge is open source so new and older participants don’t have to figure out everything by themselves lowering the barrier for local plastic recycling. The Precious Plastic vision, recasting something that is commonly seen as waste into a precious material, is also a powerful and appealing one which empowers people to take this challenge up anywhere in the world.

However, the initiatives are still in their early stages. The revenue streams from the projects need to ramp up, even though the majority of the responders highlighted that their projects are not purely commercial. The participants also highlighted that they are still working on the development phases, so there are also improvements. Circular economy also attracts makers, modifiers and fixers, broadening the Precious Plastic community. Furthermore, this movement presents a practical approach to environmentalism in which people go beyond campaigning to make a different in the world and literally bring alternatives into practice. The community also proves to be creative, customising the machines – opening up the human knowledge capital for the global community with their knowledge sharing.

The Precious Plastic platform thus takes upon the role of knowledge broker as well as others that can be possibly associated with grassroots intermediaries, and will continue to be important as the community keeps growing. The Precious Plastic community is truly glocal meaning that it largely consists of small local initiatives and form a largely virtual global community.

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What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up question? Let me know on Twitter at WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the transcripts and show notes are available! Additionally, I will highly appreciate if you consider subscribing to the podcast or on the website. I hope this was an interesting paper for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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Finally, as the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Precious Plastic was founded by Dave Hakkens but currently is grown to be an international grassroots movement to recycle and reuse plastic locally.
2. The movement represents a practical approach to environmentalism in which people go beyond campaigning to make a difference in the world and literally bring alternatives into practice.
3. The movement created a glocal community with small local initiatives but global online outreach sharing knowledge and starting business opportunities from plastic recycling with open source machines, workspaces and product ideas. .

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. What do you think about ‘traditional plastic recycling’? Do you think it useful, important, senseless, or?
2. What do you know and think about circular economies?
3. What are you doing to recycle and reuse plastic? Have you ever thought about how precious it can be?
4. What do you think about Precious Plastic?

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