Precious Plastic
Precious Plastic is an open community that gives away the designs for small plastic-recycling machines, so anyone who can weld can build one and run a local workshop.
What it does
Recycling plastic normally needs an industrial plant. Precious Plastic shrank the machinery to fit a workshop and published the plans. There are four machines:
- a shredder that grinds bottles, caps and scrap into flakes
- an extruder that melts flakes into a continuous stream, for beams and filament
- an injection moulder that shoots melted flakes into a mould, for small objects
- a sheet press that flattens flakes in an oven into sheets you can cut like plywood
The drawings, part lists, code and video tutorials are free online. The machines use steel and parts you can buy in most countries. People run them as small businesses: they collect local waste and sell what they make from it.
LAN Issue 1 reports about 2,000 registered workshops. The latest figures cover 2024 and come from the 184 workshops that reported, about a tenth of the network. They count 1,400 tonnes recycled in 56 countries by 3,935 people.
The site says "All Precious Plastic content is shared under Creative Commons Attribution."
Who runs it
- Dave Hakkens started it in 2012 as a student project at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Version 1 went online in 2013.
- Later versions followed in early 2016, late 2017 and January 2020. The site lists Version 5 as fundraising in 2025.
- The Precious Plastic Foundation, a non-profit in the Netherlands set up in 2023, runs it today. The site calls it a project of One Army.
- Memberships and donations pay for it. The three membership tiers start at €7, €12 and €60 a month, and members get a vote on priorities.
Join or copy it
- Learn the machines in the Academy.
- Find recyclers near you on the community map.
- Start a workspace with the starter kits linked from the home page.
- Join the community and ask questions at community.preciousplastic.com.
In LAN
- Issue 1/Precious Plastic, LAN Issue 1, page 13. The same page covers e-NABLE.
See also
Sources
- Precious Plastic home page, preciousplastic.com
- Mission and history, preciousplastic.com
- LAN Issue 1, "Precious Plastic / e-NABLE", page 13, September 2026 (see Issue 1/Precious Plastic)