University of Washington Precious Plastic

At a glance

Status: Active

Our Mission: To reduce plastic waste on campus. To educate others about plastic waste and recycling. To create a close-loop… Read full summary

Funding received
2018-2019
Grant type
Large
Awarded
$20,796
Funding partners
  • Student Technology Fee (STF)
  • Services and Activities Fee (SAF)

Our Mission: To reduce plastic waste on campus. To educate others about plastic waste and recycling. To create a close-loop recycling system the UW Seattle campus. To inspire others to join the fight against plastic waste. Our first goal is to build a small, safe DIY plastics recycling workshop in the Maple Hall Area 01 Maker Space. The workspace will consist of four machines that shred, melt, compress, and mold used plastic, so it can be transformed into usable products, such as 3D printing filament. We will use machines already available on the market, as well as build the remainder of the machines using open source blueprints and online resources from preciousplastic.com. This project is designed to be cross-disciplinary, providing raw material to arts and science students for 3D printing, construction projects, and as a sculptural medium. Additionally, the project will generate research opportunities in the fields of material and mechanical engineering, waste management policy, sustainability, industrial design, communications, and business development. We will partner with students, RSOs, academic and administrative departments to grow interest and engagement among students, with an aim toward shaping positive impacts on UW's plastics life-cycle from purchasing to consumption to waste and recycling practices.

Inspired by Dave Hakken's project, Precious Plastic, the University of Washington Precious Plastic (UWPP) project plans to build a small-scale plastic recycling workspace on campus in the Maple Hall Makerspace. Housing and Food Services supports Precious Plastic and has accepted the administrative responsibility for this project. The workspace will consist of four machines that shred, melt, compress, and mold used plastic, so it can be transformed into usable products, such as 3D printing filament. We will use machines already available on the market, as well as build the remainder of the machines using open source blueprints and online resources from preciousplastic.com. This project is designed to be cross-disciplinary, providing raw material to arts and science students for 3D printing, construction projects, and as a sculptural medium. Additionally, the project will generate research opportunities in the fields of material and mechanical engineering, waste management policy, sustainability, industrial design, communications, and business development. For example, Precious Plastic could be utilized as a lab space for faculty and their classes or as culminating projects for students’ theses. In the long-term, sale of recycled plastic filament and finished products can reduce costs for University departments and create a revenue stream to eventually self-fund Precious Plastic operations.

Summary

Inspired by Dave Hakken's project, Precious Plastic, we plan to build a plastic recycling workspace on University of Washington’s campus, using the free machine blueprints and online resources from preciousplastic.com. The workspace will consist of four machines which shred, melt, compress, and mold used plastic, so it can be transformed into something new. This workspace is designed to be cross-disciplinary, providing raw material to arts and science students for 3D printing, construction projects, and as a sculptural medium. Sale of recycled plastic filament and finished products can reduce costs for University departments and create a revenue stream to self-fund Precious Plastics operations. This project would generate opportunities for research on campus waste and sustainability measures, or it could be utilized as a lab space for faculty and their classes or as culminating projects for students’ theses.

Environmental impact

According to Earthday.org/2018, nine billion tons of plastic have been made since the 1950s, and every piece of plastic ever made still exists in one form or another. Less than five percent of the world’s plastic is recycled, and over 90 percent of the garbage floating in the ocean is plastic. This plastic ends up in one of the five garbage gyres in the middle of the ocean, pollutes beaches around the world, or gets consumed by animals, which either kills them or eventually introduces these chemical toxins and bacteria into our food chain.

On January 1st of 2018, China—which, in 2016, processed 7.3 million tons of waste[1]—banned importing recyclables from outside countries. With no strong market for scrap plastics, municipalities all over the U.S., Canada, and Europe are now forced to divert these reusable materials to landfills, and governments are scrambling to find a sustainable solution as landfills become overfilled. Putting pressure on America’s recycling system, this new development creates an opportunity for organizations to create innovative solutions and build domestic markets for these materials.

With a campus of over 43,000 students (not including faculty or staff), the University of Washington creates a lot of waste—roughly 11.7 tons in 2016, of which only 63 percent was recycled or diverted from landfills[2]—and our mixed recycling often ends up being delivered to landfills, without being properly recycled. The Precious Plastics program would result in four impacts on the UW Seattle Campus:

  1. Waste Diversion: By reducing the amount of plastic that leaves the campus for an unknown fate, UW can reduce the strain on our waste streams and landfills. This project could also help UW Recycling meet its quarterly waste diversion goals. We expect this process will help UW Recycling meet its goal of 70% waste diversion by 2020.[3] While output data from other Precious Plastic projects is limited, we estimate that, when fully operational, we will process approximately 1.5 tons of plastic a year.[4]
  2. Waste Reduction: Education can lead to behavioral changes. Allowing students to take a tour of our workspace, they can learn about the recycling process and the amount of work it takes to breakdown plastics, which could encourage these students to develop more sustainable habits or to make smarter choices when purchasing goods.
  3. Conserving Resources. UW can reduce its purchasing of and dependence on virgin materials and help protect our natural resources by creating a closed-loop recycling system on plastic waste.
  4. Reducing Carbon Emissions and Pollution. Diverting waste reduces the amount of carbon emissions burned transporting this trash to recycling facilities and to landfills. It also reduces the need to refine and process raw materials, which creates substantial water and air pollution. Despite growing impact of UW Recycling programs, UW net greenhouse gas emissions show growth year over year. This project will contribute to reigning in emissions generated by the University.[5

Student leadership and involvement

With student interest from a wide range of departments around campus, leadership for this project primarily stems from GreenEvans, a UW Registered Student Organization (RSO) from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance. Graduate students from this program include Emily Coleman, Katy Ricchiuto, Claire Baron Katherine Walton, and Micah Stanovsky. The undergraduate members are Isabella Castro, Sierra Schonberg, Oliver Kou, Emma Turner, David Frantz, Alishia Orloff, Alexis Neumann, and Mason Clugston.

Education, outreach, and behavior change

Our leadership will conduct presentations in undergraduate and graduate classes to raise awareness about the project and increase student involvement. We will also reach out to FIGs, organization, and clubs around UW’s campus—such as Comotion and the Department of Biology’s WOOF Club—which would have an interest in this project. At Earth Day 2019, we hope to demonstrate the machines’ capabilities and produce items for the event made from recycled plastic.

The UW Recycling department supports this project and will assist in the collection of plastics. Collection bins, placed around campus, will feature education materials about the project and the environmental issues with plastic. Outreach efforts will engage faculty for class labs or field trips, and students for thesis projects or other research. We will evaluate our program by tracking the project’s costs, processes, outcomes, and impacts. This data will allow UW to act as a leader within our community and to exemplify innovation by sharing knowledge with other schools and organizations hoping to develop their own small-scale recycling facilities.

Feasibility, accountability, and accessibility

This project will take place in several stages, each with varying degrees of complexity and feasibility.

  1. Site location: Before submitting our full proposal in the Fall 2018, we will vet and choose a location to house the machines and workspace. We will investigate four possible models for this space:
    1. Customize a shipping container workshop to locate on campus.
    2. Partner with an existing co-making or lab space on campus. This option would drive down project costs.
    3. Operate within an existing annex or similar space on campus. This option would drive down project costs.
    4. Customize a box truck as a mobile recycling workshop.
  2. Build the Machines: The free blueprints for these machines make them very cost effective and feasible to produce. Whenever possible, we will outsource labor to students to reduce expenses and source scrap materials, keeping the costs and carbon footprint of this project low.
  3. Write Safety Protocols: We will collaborate with EH&S to mitigate any safety concerns and create safety training for operators.
  4. Develop Operating and Maintenance Protocols: Before starting production, our leadership will gain use and maintenance knowledge of the machines. We will also develop sorting and washing standards for the plastics. Once we have command over the machines and process, our team will create a written manual and standardized training to educate other users.
  5. Create Product Prototypes: Our team will develop standard work for the production of 3D printer filament and a selection of compressed products.
  6. Outreach and Education: Once we accomplish the previous steps, we will open our workspace to the UW community—allowing students to use our resources for projects, offering tours for facility and their students, and encouraging other members within the broader Seattle community to learn from our project.
  7. Revenue-Generating Production: In the final stage of Precious Plastic, we envision sustaining the workspace, covering expenses through the sales of 3D printer filament at a reduced cost to other campus departments and products we create to sell to the public. We will work with clubs and organizations around campus to develop innovative ways to reuse the plastic we collect and divert from the UW’s waste stream.

Budget estimate

$50,000 - $75,000 for setup and a year of operation. Cost will vary depending on site location.

Leadership team

  • Blair Kaufer, UW Facilities Services, Blairk2@uw.edu
  • GreenEvans (Registered Student Organization)

Contacts

Blair Kaufer

UW Facilities Services, Payroll Coordinator

3900 7th Ave NE, Seattle, WA 98195

206.221.4350

blairk2@uw.edu

Emily Coleman

Master of Public Administration Graduate Student

6367 NE Radford Ave #4022, Seattle WA 98115

414.378.1356

ercole3@uw.edu

[1] Freytas-tamura, Kimiko De. “Plastics Pile Up as China Refuses to Take the West's Recycling.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 11 Jan. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/world/china-recyclables-ban.html.

[4] Our conservative estimate is based off a processing rate of 2 kilograms of plastic per hour, 15 hours a week and 48 weeks a year.

Request amount and budget

Total amount requested: $20,796
Budget administrator: See attached AAR form

How the project will react to funding reductions

95% funding would require a reduction of $1,040. We would manage this reduction by eliminating the least essential aspects of operations: sponges, towels, storage and transport containers, wood chipper for interim plastics shredding, and office furniture. This would not halt progress, but would impact efficiency and good organization, eventually causing UWPP leadership to spend more of their seeking donated goods and creating organization solutions. 90% funding would require reduction of $2,080. In addition to the purchases listed for 5% reduction, this would impact our budget for outreach efforts and duplicate safety equipment. The result would be less resources to do outreach with students, faculty, and RSOs, alongside limitations on the number of individuals working safely at one time. Therefore, we would expect to see simultaneous decreases in anticipated student engagement, slower progress toward saleable product iteration, and lower rate of product creation from smaller working group capacity. 80% funding would require a budget reduction of $4,159. Additional to the previous cuts, this would require that we reconsider our plans to build and purchase machines. Machines are central to the UWPP vision, as they are the mediums for student engagement and plastics recycling alike. While we might endeavor to construct all 4 machines under this scenario, this comes at a savings of only about $500 per machine, and would require a great deal more start-up labor time to construct and customize the Precious Plastics models to meet relevant safety requirements. We cannot make compromises on machine safety, nor would we have additional room to trim the budget for safety equipment. Therefore, altering the current plan for machine purchases and construction will be necessary at a 20% funding level. This would slow our start-up time to bring machines into operation and reduce the number of students we could would work at one time, slowing our timeline toward robust student involvement and recycled product creation.

Plans for financial longevity

Financial sustainability and revenue plan

RSO status

Beginning soon after project approval, UW Precious Plastic will apply for RSO status, independent from Green Evans (which current lends RSO sponsorship). This will enable UWPP to apply for funding of events, special projects, and outreach funds.

Saleable products

In reference to the Timeline, UWPP intends to prototype and finalize 2 reproducible products by the end of Spring quarter, 2019. Our goal is to engage industrial design, material science, and business students in market research and product design, to ensure there will be demand for our hyper-local, recycled, and student-made goods. These products will be sold at events in the nearby community, bringing in revenue. Stamped with a UWPP logo, they will also amplify our outreach effort through brand recognition and positive consumer identification. We expect to expand this product line to encompass 5-10 reusable items to replace everyday objects, commonly made from virgin plastics, instead made from plastic recycled on campus. This product line, if well-designed and properly targeted, has the potential to create revenue that will support UWPP’s plans for expansion and greater impact.

Environmental Innovation Challenge

This entrepreneurial competition challenges UW students to innovate new ideas for sustainable products. Whether in the 2018 or 2019 cycles, the UWPP leadership team believes we could submit a strong application. In particular, these funds might apply well to the process of developing products to reduce reliance on plastics within UW departments, detailed in the follow section.

UW departments

As the UWPP project gains traction, we also intend to explore the possibility for replacing virgin products commonly used by other UW departments. These may include 3-D Printer filament, UW ID badge slips given to new students, or other products yet to be identified. While this idea hinges on both organization development and product research, there is great potential for both revenue generation, waste reduction, and decreased reliance on virgin plastics campus-wide.

Future application to CSF

To pursue the UWPP Vision outlined here, we anticipate that capacity may need to increase to reach longer-term goals of significant and beneficial impact on UW waste streams. We hope to become an integral and sustainable piece of UW Seattle’s entire metabolism. To this end, we may return to CSF with a strong portfolio, proven systems, and achievable next steps toward this vision.

Continued operation plan

We also plan on creating a structure for continued operations after the current leadership graduates. By becoming our own RSO in the coming months, we will create a transition plan for leadership and student involvement. We will develop and recruit for formal leadership roles. Our leadership team will leave the UWPP with 10-year maintenance plan, established on- and off-campus partnerships, plastic and design research and prototypes, marketing and communication materials, and operation manuals that include: machine and maintenance training, Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) broken out by the distinct types of plastic, and collection and washing standards.

Problem statement

UWPP would result in four impacts on the UW Seattle Campus:

  1. Waste Diversion: UWPP will help UW Recycling meet its goal of 70% waste diversion by 2020. We estimate that, when fully operational, we will process approximately 1.5 tons of plastic a year. Our potential location, Maple Hall, generates about 56 tons of garbage a year and 21 tons of recycling a year.  If all of that material at Maple Hall was redirected to this project, it would prevent 1.23 tons of material annual from the garbage.

     
  2. Waste Reduction: Education can lead to behavioral changes. Through our outreach efforts, students can learn about the recycling process. We want to promote the lessons of a closed-loop system and encourage students to live by those principles.

     
  3. Conserving Resources: By using recycled materials in products, UW can reduce its purchasing of and dependence on virgin materials. Specific to our work with campus makerspaces and 3D printing materials, the most common type of printer filament used on campus is PLA (polylactide); PLA is primarily derived from various plant starches and can therefore be commercially composted if treated correctly, however, since “the compost of composters in the USA must be compliant with Organic Materials Review Institute (OMRI) regulations. PLA is not 100% compostable … if the compost still contains PLA residues, their compost does not meet the OMRI regulation requirements. Therefore, many composters regard PLA as a contaminant” and it remains far more energy- and cost-effective to recycle the material; according to a recent European study, the environmental impact of recycling PLA is over 50 times less than that of composting.

     
  4. Reducing Carbon Emissions and Pollution: Diverting waste reduces the amount of carbon emissions burned transporting this trash to recycling facilities and to landfills. In the most recent IPCC report, research found that petrochemicals, which include plastics, are the third-highest industrial emitter of greenhouse gases, and these emissions will grown by 20% by 2030. Despite the growing impact of UW Recycling programs, UW net greenhouse gas emissions show growth year over year, which, based on societal trends, will only get worse. This project will contribute to reigning in emissions generated by the University.

     
  5. Improving environmental equity: China called our practices of sending our contaminated recycling to other countries, “foreign garbage smuggling.” By not solving our waste issues domestically, we are continuing to place an unfair burden on others. Creating a model for small scale community recycling will allow us to take steps towards environmental justice.

     
  6. Cost Savings Benefits: One aspect of our project will be applying design to mitigate the problems plastic creates. Plastic film has become a recent problem for UW recycling since its removal from the waste stream costs roughly $17.65/hour to $23.51/hour to pay Waste Collector workers to sort. We hope to pose this issue as a design project for students in the Industrial Design program on campus to develop new plastic film recepticles to optimize the collection of materials.

Measure the impacts

Throughout the research, development, and initial use stages of the machines, we will develop performance metrics to monitor our success and fulfill CSF’s quarterly reporting requirements. While these data points have yet to be finalized, initial metrics are as follows:

  1. Starting with First Quarter of Operation

    1. Number of students Involved (enrolled, employed, volunteer, service learners)

    2. Number of student hours logged

    3. Number of media mentions (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram)

    4. Number of Class, RSO, and community groups contacted

    5. Number of events and field trips organized (UW campus and off-campus)

    6. Number of events attended and tabled  (UW campus and off-campus)

  2. Starting with Second Quarter of Operation

    1. Number of Machines Running

    2. Number of Products Designed

    3. Processable Types of Plastic

  3. Starting with Third Quarter of Operation

    1. Amount of plastic diverted (in pounds)

    2. Number of Collection Spots on Campus

    3. Amount of 3D filament or other product produced (in pounds)

    4. Amount of CO2 emittance avoided

Education and outreach goals

Our leadership will conduct presentations in undergraduate and graduate classes to raise awareness about the project and increase student involvement. The students can reach out to Precious Plastic through the use of social media (twitter, Instagram and Facebook). We will have our email in the bios for each of the social media outlets allowing anyone who is interested in UWPP to contact us. In addition, we will contact the heads of departments of majors to send out emails to the specific majors that would pertain to Precious Plastic.

The designs for the shredder and the compression machine come from years of R&D from the experiences and improvements provided by the open source community. Improvements made to the shredder and compression machines to meet safety standards will be documented and shared with the broader precious plastic community.

We will be attending several events throughout the school year such as Earth Day, Engineering Kick Off, and Program of Environment Kick off. We will reach out and attend multiple event as we learn about them and will join in. We will also reach out to FIGs, organization, and clubs around the university’s main Seattle campus—such as Comotion—which have expressed an interest in this project. On top of providing guidance in the design and production of 3D printers for student use in general, WOOF3D’s engineering lead, Raymond Guthrie, has agreed to aid in overcoming any extruder/nozzle challenges that may arise in the use of materials beyond PLA for printing filament. At Earth Day 2019, we hope to demonstrate the machines’ capabilities and produce items for the event made from recycled plastic.

Throughout the project, there are opportunities for a homework assignment, extra credit, or for experience for the students. They would come into our location and help us either create the filament, produce the items from the filament or go to learn about the organization. We will also try to work with the RA’s to have competitions between the dorms to see how much can be properly recycled. This allows engagement with the undergrad students as well as an opportunity to spread awareness of UWPP while also spreading knowledge on how to be sustainable and help the environment.

The UW Recycling department supports this project and will assist in the collection of plastics. Collection bins, initially placed in the Mapple Hall undergraduate residences, will feature education materials about the project and the environmental issues with plastic. Outreach efforts will engage faculty for class labs or field trips, and students for thesis projects or other research. We will evaluate our program by tracking the project’s costs, processes, outcomes, and impacts. This data will allow UW to act as a leader within our community and to exemplify innovation by sharing knowledge with other schools and organizations hoping to develop their own small-scale recycling facility.

Student involvement

Leadership for this project primarily stems from GreenEvans, a UW Registered Student Organization (RSO) from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance. Graduate students from this program include Emily Coleman, Katy Ricchiuto, and Micah Stanovsky. The undergraduate members of the leadership team include Isabella Castro, Sierra Schonberg, Oliver Kou, Emma Turner, David Frantz, Alishia Orloff, Alexis Neumann, and Mason Clugston. After attending the Autumn 2018 Engineering Kick Off and the Program on the Environment’s Fall Kick Off event, we have received interest from over 100 students to participate in this project. We also plan to attend more on-campus events, such as the 2018 UW Sustainability Fair. We will further work with any students who would like to incorporate Precious Plastic into their capstone projects or major. This allows us to help students who need to develop individual projects while gaining interest and involvement in Precious Plastic. Through the capstone outreach, we will teach undergrad students how to work with others on projects and give them professional experience. As our project moves through its phases, we will reach out to several different disciplines and faculty on campus.

UWPP offers three overarching opportunities for student involvement:

Research and design

We will engage with students from material and mechanical engineering to build the machines and to develop safe processes for every plastic type we will recycle. With Joyce Cooper as a faculty advisor, John Hamann, a mechanical engineering student, will use UWPP for his senior project, designing the shredder to comply with the Washington Administrative Code (WAC). Additionally, we will work with communications and graphic design students to create messaging and marketing materials to educate students about UWPP. Industrial design students could build products for the machines to create or supporting infrastructure, including specialized collection bins for certain materials. Furthermore, students from the College of Built Environments can do research regarding the collection and impact of UWPP, as well as look at the scalability of our model.

Environmental policy and impact

UWPP creates an opportunity for policy students from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance to discover potential solutions to a national waste crisis. We will also meet with the acting director of the Program on the Environment, Kristi Straus, to find a way to incorporate UWPP into Sustainability Studio, or another one of its sustainability classes.

Product use and business development

For ongoing operations, we foresee bringing in a wide range of students to design and market final products, as well as use the 3D printer filament that we produce. We would like to allow art and industrial design students to create products that we could sell in the University Bookstore. We would also invite students from the Foster School of Business to develop a business plan for the operation with the goal to become a self-sufficient operation in the future. We envision selling the 3D printer filament to students in programs such as art, architecture, medicine, engineering, and dentistry, as well as to student organizations on campus.

Project lead

Blair Kaufer

Blairk2@uw.edu

Affiliation

Staff

Categories

  • Student Technology Fee (STF)
  • Waste