A NEW INITIATIVE IN BRECKENRIDGE IS DIVERTING PLASTIC WASTE—INCLUDING MORE THAN A TON OF BROKEN TOBOGGANS—FROM THE LANDFILL.
Precious Plastic’s open-source designs include Legolike bricks for building. PHOTO: COURTESY OF PRECIOUS PLASTIC
EVERY YEAR, visitors to Breckenridge buy cheap plastic sleds to hurtle down the Carter Park sledding hill. Many of them end up splintered and tossed. Precious Plastic, a worldwide grassroots initiative, creates opportunities to transform plastic waste into art. Breck Create (breckcreate.org) has adopted the outfit’s open-source model on its campus. Based in the historic Fuqua livery stable in Breckenridge’s arts district, the Precious Plastic workspace features four open-source machines: a shredder, extruder, injector and sheet press.
“With our injection machine, you can basically extrude any shape you like,” says Drea Edwards, arts education manager at Breck Create. “It’s like a Play-Doh Fun Factory, where you push the lever down and squeeze out a shape.” It’s possible to make chip clips, carabiners and jewelry or to extrude beams for park benches. “I like to say Precious Plastic is limited only by your imagination,” she says. This summer, the Breck Create team will continue to collect hard-to-recycle plastics like yogurt cups, berry clamshells and takeout containers. “Our emphasis is really on what is not currently able to be recycled at the county recycling centers,” Edwards says. “People try to sneak in unrecyclable plastics, but that just contaminates the recycling.”
Collected plastic is first shredded into granules. PHOTO: BY JOE KUSUMOTO
Public classes and workshops are slated to open in the fall. Since last April, the town has provided Breck Create with 2,415 pounds of broken snow sleds. Once shredded into granules, the plastic can be transformed into something artistic (L.A.-based artist Richard Wilks created a kinetic jellyfish of tubes and LED lights) or something functional, like a skateboard deck. You could even turn it into—wait for it—a new sled.
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