Introducing Open Recycling

January 01, 2021 - 3 minute read

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Open Recycling is a non-profit recycling development and research project. Our goal is to increase awareness about plastics being a valuable resource. We want to acheive this by making material based recycling accessible and financially sustainable. As soon as this challenge is completed there should be no need for future generations to drive oil demand based on the worlds plastic usage.
By providing our research and technology for free, we want to distribute it in a way it benefits communities around the world. At the moment we are focused on developing and testing an automated sorting and handling facility for municipal plastic waste items.

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Background

Waste management and recycling have always been a challenging task. Within the past 50 years, popular belief about plastic recycling changed from it being a moral compensation for consumers to a necessary step to stop the destruction of many ecosystems.

With the advance of technological capabilities, first world countries started recycling plastics in an industrial and fully automated manner. These capabilities are often not given to poorer countries and communities. Additionally, the export of plastic waste to poor countries is still a business concept, which enables rich countries to increase their plastic consumption without having to deal with the consequences. Seeing initiatives like precious plastic changing the mentality of consumers and designers within the past few years is great. Plastic is a precious resource that has improved many areas of human life. But handling its residue properly is a problem humanity struggled with in the past.

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Future Plans

Recycling systems today have impressive but limited capabilities. It seems that we’ll keep improving them to a point where they will be able to sort and handle all different types and forms of post-consumer plastic items. But based on the History of developments, it’s important to come up with solutions that are accessible to every community on this planet. And at the same time producers of plastic items have to be limited and held accountable for the mess they create.

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Open Recycling

It’s hard to predict how environmental sustainability on this planet will evolve. When it comes into reach of a net-zero carbon footprint and environmental protectionism, it’ll be important to have recycling systems deployed all over our planet.

We’re hoping to grow Open Recycling into an institution that is capable of fulfilling this task.

As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world. We’ll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies.¹

Open Recycling is a project started by Armin Straller the creator of the open-source plastic sensor called reremeter.

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