We can’t believe it’s been FOUR YEARS!!! And this year we have a lot to celebrate!!
We started off the year with a nice surprise: Free Plastic had a writeup in South Florida Gay News. Considering our team is made up of 80% LGBTQ+ members, this was a special little treat for us.
This year saw the launch of our new Monthly Cleanup program where our lovely Plastic Farmer coordinated and supported monthly cleanups throughout South Florida. However, it also saw the end to something near and dear to us, our trophy line.
When we started, our trophies were a hit! Everyone loved them, and we did too! We were pushing roughly 40% recycled content into each trophy while raising awareness about ocean plastic and unrecyclable materials. However, as we produced more and monitored the waste and impact, we saw that the data showed we were generating more waste than we were recycling. The words of Maya Angelou echoed through our heads, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” And with that, we realized we had to stop production of these keepsakes. #rip
Plastic Poetry was a great success again! We installed 5 more poems throughout South Florida — in West Kendall, Liberty City, Overtown, and Key Biscayne. With our 9 installations, we have also collected 1,269 pounds of pollution; reclaimed nearly 150 pounds of plastic; and recycled over 50 pounds of plastic pollution.
While we completed our Plastic Poetry installations, we also upgraded our warehouse, over doubling it in size and adding a TON of new tools to help us grow.
Free Plastic was also invited to participate in Key Biscayne Community Foundation’s Aqua Party, where we auctioned off lazy susans & serving boards, and we produced 300 recycled polypropylene keychains to be gifted out to attendees.
Serving boards and keychains were only two of our new products. We also released earrings, new coasters, and completed two new coffee tables made from ocean plastic and salvaged hard woods. The Pixel table is made from ocean lumber that washed ashore at the beginning of the pandemic along with 907 grams (2 pounds) of unrecycleable plastics. And, our Cherry table is 1 kilogram of unrecycleable plastics along with salvaged cherry.
To close out our fourth year, we had an incredible Earth Day in South Florida. Part of our team supported the Museum of Discovery and Science with an Earth Day cleanup in Dania, while another part celebrated with the Town of Surfside by demonstrating plastic recycling and gifting out keychains to our participants at their 2023 Earth Day Resource Fair.
Then we packed up from all of that fun and raced to Apple in Aventura to participate in #TodayAtApple’s Protect Our Planet Series designed to inspire change through art, conversations, and poetry. With our amazing partners O, Miami, we taught Apple customers about recycling in South Florida and how they could make an impact in their daily lives. O, Miami taught the group how to write Urban Haikus, and then we all ran out to the patio to visualize our poetry out of 400+ letters made from recycled polyprolene pollution.
