Why local recycling?

There are so many questions looming about the efficacy of single container recycling in South Florida (and throughout the world). There are doubts about whether the products are being recycled, or if they are casually skirting the recycling plants and being loaded into the incinerator, or landfill, or both.

In May 2019, Scientific American reported that that single stream recycling can limit the ability to recycle a large majority of the recyclables within — glass is crushed, liquids contaminate paper, actual garbage & food waste contaminates it, the wrong plastics are included — and all of this makes recycling more costly, less efficient, and in the end, potentially impossible.

In the same article, Waste Management discusses how humans hired to sort the mixed recyclables are not “willing to show up every day, and many quit within hours.”

Why community-based recycling?

WLRN tells us that Waste Management contracts with most of the cities of Broward County have provisions that allow the hauler to decide if the recyclables go to their recycling plant or the landfill. Local10 tells us that there aren’t buyers for glass, and that broken glass can contaminate the entire load of recyclables.

Bottom line, our recyclables are not being recycled, and some cities in South Florida don’t even “waste” the energy attempting to recycle their waste.

When we look to our coastlines, we see local groups like Sun of a Beach Cleanup, #Fillabag, and Surfrider Foundation pulling out hundreds of pounds of pollution from our beaches’ wrack line on a weekly and/or daily basis. This pollution, including our discarded plastics, is everywhere, and it is destroying our environment and fauna.

BUT, all of this plastic could be a resource. It could be a resource that we can harvest, cultivate, and refine into a new beginning, a new product.

Free Plastic

Free Plastic’s goal is to harness the manufacturing power of plastic pollution that is 100% organically-farmed from our beautiful beaches and locally-sourced from our parks, pathways, waterways, and green spaces. Free Plastic is a product that naturally washes ashore on a daily basis and gives us a near limitless supply of manufacturing materials.

Free Plastic will exploit our community’s naturally-occurring plastic pollution by removing it from the recycling, composte, and waste streams, and fixing it into useable, sellable, cherishable products that are lovingly hand-crafted right here in South Florida.