An Open Source Plastic-Recycling Machine, From the Inventor of Phonebloks

Dave Hakkens wondered: why not build a system that could make recycling plastic more accessible?

When a young Dutch designer named Dave Hakkens released Plonebloks, a concept for a modular phone, it set the internet on fire and helped Google along the same path. The explosion of attention was an accident. Hakkens, a recent graduate of The Design Academy in Eindhoven, actually had another thesis project in the works that he planned to pursue: Precious Plastics, a series of magpie-like machines that turn discarded plastic bottles and trash into new housewares. Like Phonebloks, it’s aimed at reducing waste, and creating a long lifecycle for the goods in our lives. He's just recently open-sourced the designs, for anyone to download.

design_disrupt

“It sort of all started when I noticed we have a lot of plastic waste,” Hakkens says. “For a lot of reasons, we can’t do anything with plastic. With wood, you have a carpenter. I heard that less than 10% is recycled. Which is weird—it’s easy to recycle, and you only need low temperatures.” Hakkens paid visits to collection facilities and plastics manufacturers around The Netherlands to find out why that percentage is so low. “Basically the problem was that plastic production goes really fast, so they don’t want to use recycled plastic because it might be dirty and slow them down,” he says.

>“You can have a carpenter, or a metal worker, and now you can have a plastics person,” he says.

Hakkens wondered: why not build a system that could make recycling plastic more accessible? So he built a shredder, plus three different kinds of small-scale manufacturing machines: a rotational molding device, an extrusion machine, and an injection molding machine (The bulk of plastic goods—think laundry detergent bottles, or bottle caps—are made with plastic injection molding.)

Each one is constructed from various pieces of sheet metal and scrap parts. The extrusion machine uses a wheel Hakkens took from an old washing machine, and the rotational molding device uses a small salvaged oven to melt and shape pieces.

The machines are rudimentary by design; Hakkens wants his plastics workshop to be something that could exist anywhere in the world. “Most of the parts are things you can find around, because I’m not sure what materials they have in Africa or India,” he says. That’s why he released the blueprints online—he hopes to get feedback from interested parties about how they could be built in other countries.

Unlike 3-D printers—another form of small scale manufacturing—Hakkens doesn’t see Precious Plastics as a consumer good. Instead, he envisions small community centers where people can drop off plastic waste, get reimbursed for it, and then the shop will convert the old bottles and litter into purchasable goods. “That was the idea,” Hakkens says. “You can have a carpenter, or a metal worker, and now you can have a plastics person.”