Precious Plastic
open hardware plastic recycling project
Precious Plastic is an open hardware plastic recycling project and is a type of open source digital commons project. The project was started in 2013 by Dave Hakkens and is now in its fourth iteration. It relies on a series of machines and tools which grind, melt, and inject recycled plastic, allowing for the creation of new products out of recycled plastic on a small scale.
History
In 2012, Dave Hakkens started working on Precious Plastic as a part of his studies at the Design Academy in Eindhoven. The project was released in 2013 as Version 1.0.
The work on version 2 was started in 2015 and was released in March 2016. In 2016, Precious Plastic also created a marketplace called Bazar for selling machines and products targeted to DIY designers to recycle plastic.
The team started working on version 3.0 from early 2017 and was launched in October 2017.
In May 2018, Precious Plastic received the Famae award of €300,000 to further develop the project. The city of Eindhoven also provided them a big workspace free of charge.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Precious Plastic” is open hardware plastic recycling project. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Precious, Plastic and hardware, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q85794325. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2013, 2012, 2015 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “Precious Plastic” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.