Portfolio

Precious Plastic Portugal

WHAT

Open source machines, tools and infrastructures developed by Product Designer Dave Hakkens and his team to fight plastic pollution from the bottom up. For free.

HOW

Precious Plastic is a global community of hundreds of people working towards a solution to plastic pollution. Knowledge, tools and techniques are shared online, for free.

In Portugal it all started in 2016 when I together with Cyrille Dubois and Inês Prates first built the V2 of the Precious Plastics Machines for Fab Lab Barcelona at IAAC and the machines were used during the Made Again event.

After the success in Barcelona we decided to bring the first set of machines to Portugal. As pioneers we wanted to build a community around the country to encourage more people to take action towards this global problem. We decided to do a country wide tour, for the tour we designed and manufactured the mould for a surf board wax scrapper and we brought the set of machines to several surf event's in Portugal, inviting people to clean the beaches during the event and transform the plastic waste into a valuable product that could be used during the event.

The tour ended at OPO'Lab a Fab Lab located in Porto where I worked for 4 years and continued my goal to promote the Precious Plastic project, reaching it's peak when we became the number one sellers at the Precious Plastic Bazar.

Now a Day's after leaving OPO'Lab I took the project to VIVALab where we are mainly focused on developing product design, educational and consultancy projects with the Precious Plastic philosophy of sustainability and community spreading the word through beautifully designed projects.

Such products include the book from photo journalist Mario Cruz where we designed and produced the cover for his book on his report on the waste problem in Manila where we wanted to transmit the problem the citizens of Manila are feeling on a daily basis to the hands of the reader! With this project we were invited by Dave Hakkens and his team to showcase it at the Dutch Design Week 2019.

P.E.T MINI Skateboard is another product I developed for my Masters in Product & Industrial Design at Porto's University, in collaboration with VIVALab and the Precious Plastic team in Eindhoven using plastic waste.

WHY

Plastic pollution can afflict land, waterways and oceans. It is estimated that 1.1 to 8.8 million metric tons of plastic waste enters the ocean from coastal communities each year.

As of 2018, about 380 million tons of plastic is produced worldwide each year. From the 1950s up to 2018, an estimated 6.3 billion tons of plastic has been produced worldwide, of which an estimated mere 9% has been recycled and another 12% has been incinerated.

Some researchers suggest that by 2050 there could be more plastic than fish in the oceans by weight.

Precious Plastic is a global community of hundreds of people working towards a solution to plastic pollution. Knowledge, tools and techniques are shared online, for free.