Initial impressions of precious plastics

I first became aware of the precious plastics movement when Felix Beck introduced it and gave a tour of the lab two years back. Ever since hearing about the movement, I was questioning the precious plastics movement’s impact. A simple way to see the tangible returns is to see the activities the movement is engaged in. In seeking to make a profitable business out of starting a precious plastics workshop it seems the community resorts to workshop sessions, building machines, or collecting plastic and making products. The action set is narrowed down on two scales: consumer-facing products and educational outreach. We have read and discussed that large-scale recycling is inefficient even when done at a large scale – one can imagine our impact at the movement’s scale. That leaves the cause’s impact to educational outreach. In the past few sessions in class and readings, we have been made aware of the magnitude of the plastic problem and it seems our actions as members of this niche crowdsourced recycling community are minimal in the face of the problem. At a time where we are questioning the impact of individual habit changes, this niche of a niche intervention supposed cascading impact fails to be clear to me. I am all for collective action in the face of a big threat but I fail to see the returns. I question this personally with my proximity to the Plastics Lab we have here at NYUAD where I have neither been educated by its efforts nor have I been a beneficiary of its products – even if I were, is it significant, impactful?  Open source, decentralized initiatives are great! I think the precious plastics community deserves an internal audit and retrospection of its impact on the problems it’s attempting to heal through education.

I’ll come back and edit this post if I find myself wrong as this class progresses. Very grateful to Adele Hatha for making the time to speak in our class.