Precious Plastic

A woman in a work jacket with a round chest patch holding up a square metal mold with a pink hexagonal piece inside. — Source names no photographer; footer: all content shared under Creative Commons Attribution

Dave Hakkens's Precious Plastic project gives communities open-source blueprints for small-scale recycling machines, letting anyone turn plastic waste into new, valuable products.

This ethos of empowerment is powerfully extended by the open-source model, exemplified by the Precious Plastic initiative. Founded by designer Dave Hakkens, this global project provides a community with open-source blueprints for building small-scale recycling machines—shredders, extruders, and injection molders—empowering anyone, anywhere, to jointly work with a problematic material (plastic waste) and locally designed technologies to transform it into new, valuable products.