Precious Plastic (Copy)

Collaborative Project
Summer 2019

• Recycled Plastic

Precious Plastic is an open source plastic recycling project and is a type of digital commons project, now in its fourth iteration. It relies on a series of machines and tools which grind, melt, and inject recycled plastic, allowing for the creation of new products out of recycled plastic on a small scale. As a Product Designer for Precious Plastic, I worked to develop their most highly-requested product: a geodesic dome.

If you’re unfamiliar with Precious Plastic I recommend watching the above 2 minute video to learn more about their environmental mission to increase the accessibility of small-scale plastic recycling operations through the creation and publication of free, open-source plans for plastic recycling machinery, business plans, and community engagement methods.

Geodesic dome components are the product most highly requested of Precious Plastic.

Here I will write about why these designs are bad and mine is good.

After extensive material research we determined that in a dome, the most effective, affordable, and structurally sound use of recycled plastic is as injection-molded connecting hubs. The beams are made of readily-available pine.