DIY Recycling with Precious Plastics

Have you heard of Precious Plastics? It's a movement of recycling enthusiasts and designers who shred, melt and mould used plastic into new items.



Today I met some of the people from the Precious Plastics Brisbane group at UQ's Sustainability Week. Their big piece of local news is that the State Library is soon going to have a set of equipment. I'm looking forward to trying that out.

So how does it work?

This week they are collecting lids from plastic bottles, like milk bottle lids for example. They hope to fill this jar many times over.

About 80-90 lids, when shredded up, fill a jar about this size:

Then those can be melted and injected into a mould (like below left) to make a new item. In this case a small multi-coloured cup / pen-holder. But it can be anything.

If you're in Brisbane, you may be interested in joining the Facebook group.

Wherever you live you can join the community (and see more videos) via the Precious Plastics website.