Trash as Abundance

In the universe of Star Trek (the best universe), replicators can fabricate nearly anything you need – food, a new uniform, a replacement interphasic compensator (?) - by building it up from its molecular components. There's no such thing as trash. When you're done with something, you simply put it back into the replicator to be broken down into its elements to be used to build something new again. The crew of the starship Enterprise lives in infinite abundance.

And even though we don't have replicator technology (yet!), we too live among infinite abundance. Our material wealth is easy to ignore when we're focused on building new things from virgin materials and leaning on old technologies, but maybe reframing waste as a raw material itself could change that perception.

Buckminster Fuller believed (40 years ago!) that we live in an era where technology, properly and equitably focused, could feasibly support all of humanity at a sustainable and high standard of living. This philosophy has guided my engineering practice for many years, which is why I've recently chosen to focus on a small portion of our perceived scarcity problem – plastic waste. Plastic trash might be our most abundance resource of all, and while microplastics languish in our oceans and wreak havoc on our bodies, perhaps we might find that we can create something worthwhile from this burden. Virgin plastic production has proven to be a dangerous and resource-intensive, but the plastic that we've already produced will be on Earth forever. Why not put it to good use?

The Reclamation Factory is building the machines to do just that. Keep an eye out for updates on our work in making plastic trash a valuable resource and upcoming announcements!