Precious Plastic York

We are Precious Plastic York and we want to kickstart the plastic revolution in York. We are raising £5000 for our own machinery so that we can recycle our own plastics, we want to inspire the shift from a linear to circular economy,  transforming plastic waste to locally produced sustainable designs - anything from coasters to building bricks! M&S will be match funding your donations!

We want Precious Plastic York to be a community space inspiring change; giving people the experience and tools they need to continue to rethink waste.

Who are we?

We are the St Nicks Recycling Team. We collect residential and business recycling from premises all over York. We collect over 35 tonnes of recycling a month on load bearing tricycles and fully electric vehicles. So we have the hands on experience (and access to plenty of materials!) to make this project happen, along with our colleagues and other partners.  Each of us is passionate about waste minimisation, the environment and what we can do to make the world a little bit better.

St Nicks have always been hands on with waste. Our 24 acre local nature reserve is actually on a former landfill site. St Nicks is the green heart of York; a centre for nature and green living, with an ambitious vision for York.  St Nicks nature reserve is home to over 1,000 species and appeals to a wide range of explorers from regular dog walkers and nature lovers, to keen amateur wildlife photographers and bird spotters.

The centre itself is a visitor attraction offering educational and hands-on guidance around recycling, eco-friendly practises and carbon-neutral living. St Nicks runs a host of activities supporting personal wellbeing and courses about carbon neutral lifestyles and life on the reserve including natural management; scything and hedge laying.

The problem

Have you ever noticed the litter that is piling up in your local river or stream?  

If you’ve ever walked down the beautiful Yorkshire coastline, you’ve probably been disgusted by all the litter washed up on the beach.  But where does it come from?  It’s likely that some of this has come from the sea, but most of what you’ll see has actually been washed down from our rivers.

Is there one place to blame?  Absolutely not.  Beach litter doesn’t start at the beach at all.  In Yorkshire’s case, it’s easy to blame Hull, close to the coast with the river Humber feeding out into the North Sea.  But while certainly, some litter originates there, the problem actually begins much earlier.  The Humber is formed by the river Trent, which starts life in Staffordshire, and York’s own river Ouse.  Problem solved – York’s to blame for the littered beaches.

Most plastics are used for mere minutes but will last in our ecosystems for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. Not only are animals physically consuming and getting entangled in plastics the plastics can release harmful compounds such as hormone disruptors and carcinogens. These chemicals, and the physical microplastics then get passed up the food chain (termed bioaccumulation) meaning the top predators such as whales are accumulating the highest levels of contaminants. Unfortunately it's been found that humans are eating plastic too. Microplastics have been found in seafood, salt and water!

Only 2% of packaging becomes new packaging, 8% is downgraded into lower quality materials and the rest is either sent to landfill or incinerated and then sent to landfill! Now we think plastic can be an amazing material - without it many of the things we take for granted today wouldn't be possible (sterile surgical appliances anyone?).

The solution: Precious Plastic York

We will work with an engineering firm to design and build plastic recycling machinery based on the open source designs available from Precious Plastic. Precious Plastic is a global initiative helping local people solve local problems. We believe that if people can get hands on and understand the processes involved they might rethink their opinions on waste and see it as the resource we know it is.

Our plans

We hope to raise enough money to build a plastic shredder, an extruder and a  plastic injector. This will enable us to make brand new products out of the plastic we are recycling, which in turn can still be recycled at the end of their life. We hope to inspire and educate people to see that a circular economy - where nothing gets thrown away, everything can be reused and repurposed - is better than our current systems. In an ideal world this will kickstart momentum towards zero waste in York, as people see for themselves that the processes don't stop once you've thrown an item in your bin.

We hope to get the public, school and children's groups involved on site, through hands on workshops and education sessions. We will also be inviting designers, innovators, universities and engineers to come and play with our machinery to fully explore all the possibilities. The sky’s the limit: jewellery, tree guards, planters, ethical trophies, tiles, bird feeders, beams and bricks for building use are some examples of items we expect to be able to make.

Products we design and make will be sold to invest in new machinery and to subsidise the cost of the workshops keeping them accessible for all.

Close the loop!

We'll be diverting materials that often have a short usage life or are single use from incineration or landfill. We will create long lasting, sustainable items reducing the reliance on these products making sure at the end of their life they are still fully recyclable; closing the loop.

How will this help?

Recycling is great but there are better waste reduction solutions. This project has at least five waste reduction aims:

• 1 to reuse plastic, saving it from a long journey to be recycled into usually poor quality/disposable products. 
• 2 to encourage people to rethink their relationship to waste and change their behaviour through engagement in our sessions and/or involvement in the Precious Plastics community.
• 3 to use design principles to create sustainable long-lasting products that can be made into something new by us at the end of their (long) life cycle, modelling circular economy principles
• 4 where possible, for our products to help reduce landfill through their very function, e.g. reusable food containers.
• 5 through engagement with STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Maths) students and professionals, providing a real life “test bed” for a wide range of people to learn about and come up with practical and creative solutions for waste reduction.

Who is involved? 

We are working with the Biorenewable Development Centre to ensure all processes involved are 100% safe, this will also reinforce our ability to educate the public about material sciences for instance, why some plastics can be recycled and other seemingly similar materials cannot.

The Bishy Weigh have also backed our project offering to stock products that promote zero waste in York.

Treligan are supporting our project, as an organisation who pride themselves on focusing on the "worst problem first" - we are so excited to be able to work with them on the plastic problem.

How the funding works
The £40,000 match-funding will be split into two funding pots. £15,000 will be ring-fenced to ensure all 15 shortlisted projects receive £1,000 match-funding, subject to hitting milestone one. The remaining £25,000 match-funding will be available on a first come, first served basis to the 15 shortlisted projects subject to hitting milestones two and three outlined below.

Milestone one - Raise £1,000, receive a £1,000 match funding pledge from M&S Energy.

Milestone two - Raise a further £1,500, receive a £1,500 match funding pledge from M&S Energy.

Milestone three - Raise a further £2,500, receive the final £2,500 match funding pledge from M&S Energy.

You must first receive at least 30 unique supporters via your Crowdfunder campaign before you can access the first £1,000 match-funding pledge.