Processing household plastic into new products.
Reduction of Waste
Environmental Awareness
Sense of Belonging / community identity
Innovation on product / service
diffuse competence
Design methods / thinking
Participatory process / design
Prototyping methods
Institutional Capacity
Social Activism
prototyping / testing phase
Community Plastics is one of the circular economy startups hosted within the BlueCity incubator. Founded in 2014, the company processes household plastics into new products, such as street tiles. They join forces with volunteers and City residents to collect plastics and other valuable materials that can be given a second life. The process of transforming local plastic waste into new products entails the steps of collecting plastics, sorting the different types, cleaning the material and melting it into moulds to produce the new product. Additionally, the company offers public workshops to explain the process to other members of the BlueCity community and ordinary citizens willing to contribute to either collecting plastic waste in the City or creating new objects out of this waste.
Although still at an initial stage of development as a company, the Community Plastics startup has introduced and tested a circular process transforming waste material into new products. Therefore, their business model has been effectively validated.
Community Plastics is tackling the societal issue of waste generation and management in urban areas, and depletion of material resources, more specifically regarding the issue of household plastic waste. However, the root element that the initiative is tackling is people’s behaviour towards material consumption and waste generation. To do so, they aim and creating communities of locals involved in their neighbourhoods household plastic waste management and reuse.
One of the products delivered by the company are particular tiles that can be placed as normal tiles to play at marbles on the street. Such a product continues to promote the company’s social design philosophy to keep plastics in the community by reusing it while at the same time promoting outdoor life in a less polluted environment.
Community Plastics is innovative in its approach to the societal issue of waste generation, as they see the challenge of reusing plastic waste as a new material from a human-behaviour perspective. They think the aspect that needs to be worked out is people’s motivation to recycle and reuse their own plastic waste, and they propose the idea of creating local communities as a possible solution
Web: https://www.communityplastics.nl/
Domain of actions
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Object of Innovation
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Design Competence
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Design Methods
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Relation to the Urbanscape
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Project Development Phase
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