Pondering Plastic

Precious Plastic is an initiative that I came across while reading a favorite blog of mine not long ago. The video below explains it much better than I could, but there are a couple points I would like to focus on. One, I am a fan of almost anything that increases an individual's ability to create what they need for themselves. Two, I find it even more intriguing when trash turns out to be valuable. Watch the video below and you'll understand more.

It would be very easy to view this as simply another recycling campaign that makes you feel bad for enjoying all the great things that create waste in our culture. While there is certainly an undeniable call for environmental responsibility I see this as much more than that. It is a very real opportunity to capitalize on a resource that is LITERALLY just laying around.

One of plastic's properties that makes it both so useful and so damaging is that it takes an incredibly long time to break down in nature. Natural materials with those properties (e.g. gold, silver, diamonds) are so valuable we based our currency on them for thousands of years. Why is plastic treated like waste? Most plastics that went into the dump 20 years ago are just as useful now as they were then. 

"Natural materials with those properties... are so valuable we based our currency on them for thousands of years."

I understand that nobody gets excited about a ring with a piece of plastic on it, or a beautiful sculpture plated in high density polyethylene. But I think we must admit how odd it is that such a useful material that we constantly make more of is just laying around in piles. I'm willing to bet we've all seen the pictures of beaches clogged with plastic bottles and bags. Even if you don't live near a location like that it's likely that there is a sizable amount of plastic that sits on the curb by your house each week.

All these factors combined with the eventual scarcity of petroleum make me think there has to be a business model here for an enterprising individual. The growing popularity of Thingiverse and Kickstarter lead me to believe that we will see more 'garage manufacturing' like this in the future.