How Does Free Plastic Work?
Our plastics are farmed from our local environment by our plastic farmer Sun of a Beach Cleanup. Once the plastic is sorted out of the collected pollution, it is delivered to Free Plastic to begin it’s next journey.
We sort the recyclable plastics by type, shred it up by color, give it all a good wash & dry, and then box the plastics until they are ready to be melted down into new objects.
For anything that is too polluted or and specific types of plastics, we do the same sort/shred/clean/box process, but we store these to be used in our epoxy pours.
We are also working on a recycling program from thermoset plastics. Any unwanted trophies, toys, trinkets, or tables made by Free Plastic can be returned to us for recycling. Contact us here to learn more.
Farming Plastic
Plastics can be found everywhere nowadays — on the beach, in the surf, on our reefs, in our parks, on our streets.
Focusing on low-impact, environmentally-friendly farming techniques, our plastic farmers carefully collect this plastic from our local environment.
Note: You can become a plastic farmer too! Just grab a bucket and start filling it up. You’ll be amazed at how quickly your bucket begins to overflow.
Cleaning & Sorting Plastics
Our farmers remove the major debris and rinse the containers out. Once cleaned, the gently harvested plastic pollution can be dropped in one of Free Plastic’s bins for use in future projects.
We enjoy sorting our plastics by type and color. The plastics found on the coast of South Florida come in numerous classifications and types. Our favorites include:
- Polyethylene (2 & 4)
- Polypropylene (5)
- Polystyrene (6)
- Polyethyleneterephthalate (1)
Btw, we’re working to give some thermoset plastics a new life too!
Melting & Reshaping Free Plastic
We enjoy sorting our plastics by type and color, and then we introduce them to our friend, The Shredder.
We input plastic bottles and straws, yellow vinagre bottles, white cloro bottles, miscellaneous bottle caps, forks, knives, spoons, and prescription bottles. Our shredder chews them up and outputs plastic mulch ready for production.
Once we have our mulch, it’s just a matter of heating it to the right temperature and molding it into a new object, a bucket, keychain, board, bookends, shelving… anything!
Pouring Plastics
Sometimes plastics have lived in our environment for too long, and they are covered in barnacles or have deeply embedded algae, dirt, and other growths.
For any of our farmed plastics deemed too dirty to melt, for any found PVC (4) plastic, for most objects in the mysterious plastic 7 category, and for some thermoset plastics, we have another method to recover their manufacturing power.
We shred and mix these with epoxy to be poured into new products like our little fish or our trophies for the Citizen Scientist Project’s Key Challenge awards ceremony.
Support Free Plastic! We need to get a bigger shredder. A compression oven will let us make more plates and tiles, and an injection machine will allow us to pump out plates, tiles, and various molds. Make a donation today and help us farm more plastic from our local environment.