San Carlos nonprofit turns hard-to-recycle plastic into useful new products
By Anne Makovec
At the Open Sauce science festival in San Mateo, at one of the booths, spectators saw how plastic waste could make an eye-catching hair comb in very little time.
The demonstration wowed chemist Dr. Tom de Prinse, the host of Explosions&Fire on YouTube.
“I have this thing about recycling plastics. It’s so difficult. It’s so important to try and do it,” de Prinse said.
The person who made the comb is Nick Schick. He said one can make all kinds of cool stuff out of hard-to-recycle plastics.
“We work exclusively with a type of plastic called thermoplastics,” said Schick.
Less than 10% of plastic ever gets recycled. The rest ends up in landfill, where it eventually breaks down into microplastics that get into the air, soil, and water.
Schick is a student at UCLA and is studying microplastics.
“It is on every street corner. It’s in the woods. It’s in you. It’s in the ocean,” he noted.
Schick is the founder of Peninsula Precious Plastics, a nonprofit located in San Carlos.
“Precious Plastics exists to sequester that plastic into reusable objects. So, we’re rehoming the plastic, so it doesn’t end up in places we don’t want,” he said.
Nick’s father, David, and his mother, Andrea, play major roles in the nonprofit.
“We essentially teach people to reduce, reuse and repurpose plastic,” explained Andrea.
The nonprofit accepts plastic waste donations from various community groups that include pill bottles, needle caps, six-pack rings, and even broken pickleballs.
A special machine shreds it into tiny pieces that can be used by the various machines and equipment used at the nonprofit. The shredded plastic is melted and molded into colorful new items, like keychains, flowerpots, clipboards, and large sheets of plastic.
“With those large sheets, we can actually make furniture, like desks, chairs, stools, bookshelves”, explained David.
The team is open to ideas.
“We get these incredible students, engineers, artists, and out-of-the-box thinkers who come up with the ideas to reduce plastic waste,” added Andrea.
One out-of-the-box thinker is Stanford student Sofie Roux, the founder of BloomBox Design Labs. The idea is to transform shipping containers into innovative solar-powered education hubs that are portable.
Roux’s first location is in Malawi, a landlocked country in Southeast Africa. But she soon realized that her hubs needed school desks.
“I noticed that a lot of plastic waste, instead of getting properly recycled, some of it actually ends up being burned,” explained Roux.
Malawi has difficulty processing all the plastic waste, she said, because of a lack of infrastructure.
Roux heard about Peninsula Precious Plastics and got in touch with them about her desk project. The Malawi Partnership and Project used open-source Precious Plastic machines to press the plastic waste into durable sheets.
Those involved in the project include Peninsula Precious Plastics, BloomBox Design Labs, Art Malawi, and waste advisors.
David traveled with Malawi to help set up a system and to show people how to take these large plastic sheets and cut them into desks.
“Oh my gosh, we were all so excited. It was like one of those magic, magic moments. It was so much fun seeing students sit in the desk for the first time,” Roux recalled.
