Can a household appliance solve the problem of soft plastic waste?

A unique way to recycle soft plastics. Entertaining and easy to use. Accepts an impressive amount of material. Significantly reduces household waste.

Big and heavy. The required subscription includes one mailer per month. You can feel the block forming. The “Percentage Full” figure is not a real-time representation.

I am testing one a good amount of sustainable home technology for WIRED, from smart bird feeders has smart indoor gardensbut I’ve never seen anything like Clear Drop’s Soft Plastic Compactor, or SPC.

Measuring 2.5 feet tall and made of stainless steel with a black lid, the 61-pound SPC could easily be mistaken for a trash can. It works a bit like a paper shredder, but seeing it in action is almost hypnotic, akin to ASMR. Press the release button on the top control panel and powerful rollers will suck up your plastic, like dollar bills being fed into a change machine. (These rollers can be locked for the safety of children or curious pets.) Any plastic you can crumple in your hand is fair game, from bubble wrap and Amazon envelopes to shrink wrap and freezer bags.

When the device’s sensors indicate it is full, the SPC will compact up to 3 pounds of material and merge it into a shoebox-sized block. The block is then sent in an enclosed mailer to a designated recycling facility, which will grind it into a raw material that can be compressed into items such as composite decking and traffic safety cones.

If there are soft plastic collection services, such as Terracycle And Ridwellthere is no other device like the SPC that pre-treats waste in a user’s home. However, after testing this machine for four months, I’m just not convinced that this is a practical device for the average consumer.

Let’s get the most egregious part out of the way first: SPC requires a $799 deposit, more a monthly subscription of $49 for 24 months, which only includes one shipment per month. So that means a buyer will ultimately spend $2,000 on the unit itself and ultimately have to purchase couriers, which currently cost around $15 each. I had to ask Clear Drop founder Ivan Arbouzov who, exactly, was considering buying this.

“It’s a very fair question,” he said. “Right now, early adopters tend to be people who are already highly motivated by sustainability: households who actively sort waste and who are frustrated by the difficulty of dealing with soft plastics. »

Am I that motivated? To be honest, I kept the SPC in my kitchen during testing and was surprised not only by how often I used it, but also by how discreet it was. It takes up about 2 square feet of space, but it doesn’t make any noise except when compacting (about 60 decibels, but that’s rare). There are no distracting lights and there is no app. All necessary tasks can be accomplished with four buttons (lock or unlock, reverse feed, manual feed, beep on or off) and a small digital display.

The screen shows a calculation of “percent full”, but this number does not update as more plastic is added, as one might expect. Instead, the determination is based on the last time the machine detected that it was time to compact its contents. You’ll know it’s calculating whether or not to compact when a little “CR” appears in the upper right corner. If it compacts and detects that its content is 100%, it will present the option to form a block. You can choose to form the block right away or at some point in the future.

Blocking, which involves heating the plastic just enough so that it sticks, is a silent process that takes about half an hour, followed by a cooling period. The manual says it takes three hours to cool down, but I found it to be closer to an hour. When the screen says it’s finished, you lift the lid and the finished block rises dramatically on a telescoping platform, like Beyoncé at a concert.

Despite the manual’s assurance that the SPC has been “tested for air quality,” you’ll feel the block forming, and it smells… well… like something you shouldn’t be breathing. It’s not strong enough to fill a room, but if you’re a few feet from the unit you’ll definitely get a disconcerting smell.

Around the block

I actually saw the finished product before I was able to test the machine. A package arrived at my house from Clear Drop’s Product Manager, Matt Daly, containing pre-addressed poly mailers ($45 for three) and a representative 12 x 8 x 4 inch white plastic block with rounded edges, from Daly’s own home. (“Clean,” he assured in a note.) It looked like a shaggy igloo brick: a consumer layer of Ziplocks, Amazon mail, and produce bags. Although the flat bottom was largely opaque, I could make out the label of a bag of Thomas’ Bagel Thins.

Soft plastics are known to jam sorting machinessneaking into the processing chains, and wreak havoc on the environment. They are also not accepted in most municipal curbside collection programs.

There are facilities to recycle this type of plastic, but getting the waste to these places clean and free of what some call “wishful recycling” items (compostable cups, plastic utensils) is such a challenge that the the majority of soft plastics, even recycled bags at the front of grocery stores, end up in the trash. The SPC is what Arbouzov calls a “pre-recycling device,” designed to simplify this flow and provide plastic that is contained, traceable, and more likely to pass through the system.

I tried to imagine how the blocks would turn into patio furniture, as advertised, but didn’t learn exactly how until months later, when Arbouzov sent me a video of the blocks at their final destination: a facility in Frankfort, Indiana, that specializes in processing polyethylene and polypropylene films. The blocks are shredded into crumbs resembling, at least on video, handfuls of wet newspaper, which are then compressed into composite decking, chairs, garden borders, etc.

“The complete cycle from sending a block to its recycling processing typically takes a few weeks,” Arbouzov said, “depending on shipping time and batch processing schedules.” Currently, the Frankfurt site is the only one processing blocks, but Arbouzov hopes this will only be temporary.

“Our goal is to bring this processing closer to where the material is generated, so that the blocks can be transported in bulk through regional recycling infrastructure rather than postal logistics,” he said. “The mail-back system is essentially a bridge to capture the material today while this larger infrastructure develops.”

Recycling, Rewired

I found that my household of three was able to produce a block every two weeks, which quickly exceeded the amount of mail supplied. As the blocks began to pile up on my office floor, I found myself wishing the SPC would do something useful for consumers. Spoons, straws, 3D printing filament… anything that can be used at home.

However, a 2023 Greenpeace report found that recycling plastic can actually make it even more toxic than it already is: heating it can not only cause existing chemicals to leak into the air and water, but even create new ones, like benzene. Would I want this in my house? Does recycled plastic really have its place in a circular economy? I asked Arbouzov what he thought about it.

“We know that argument,” he said. “These are typically linked to mixed or poorly controlled recycling streams, where unknown additives can accumulate over multiple cycles. This is one reason why traceable and controlled material streams are important. When recyclers receive polyolefin-a rich raw material, they can process it according to defined specifications rather than processing highly contaminated mixed waste.

This got me thinking about the types of places known for constant streams of plastic waste: businesses and institutional settings like schools and hospitals. These are actually some of the most important use cases for SPC, Arbouzov said.

Clear Drop is leading a pilot collaboration with The Shaw Institutea nonprofit scientific research organization in Maine that studies plastic pollution, toxic chemicals, and climate-related impacts on oceans and human health. As part of this collaboration, an SPC is used in Shaw Laboratory as part of its internal sustainability strategy.

According to Arbouzov, other successful business collaborations with SPC include a Texas-based holding company office with catering and transportation operations and a bridal and tuxedo boutique seeking a way to recycle its constant stream of garment bags, shrink wrap and packaging film.

Ultimately, Arbouzov said, SPC is not so much a consumer gadget as a transitional product aimed at building better waste management infrastructure. “More broadly, our goal is not just to sell household appliances,” he said. “It’s about building a distributed recycling infrastructure, where some of the preparation happens directly where the waste is produced.”

I enjoyed my time at SPC, and it definitely made me more aware of the large volume of soft plastics that pass through my home every week. However, is recycling soft plastics ultimately my problem to solve? From filter our own water has purify our own air And compost our own food scrapsthe burden of managing waste and ensuring a healthy environment continually shifts to consumers, who only have so much money, time and bandwidth. Maybe that these resources could be better used to advocate for system-level change, such as limiting the manufacturing of soft plastics to begin with.