Precious Plastics - Maker Space

Precious plastics is a community of people that help; collect old plastic products, breakdown the products to make new ones and collaborate with other people to bring communities together to do all of this. Similar to what circular and co do they are trying to give plastics a new life after their disposed of and thrown away to create new products that can be used more than once. MakerSpace is part of this community and is based in Cheshire.

In November I had the opportunity to see how this group of people work up-close and to understand the movement more. MakerSpace is a club in a secondary school that work with the breakdown and making portion of the process and they gave a demonstration of how it was done. It was fascinating to see this whole process of injection moulding done just within a school as the process is usually seen to be an industrial practice only done on big projects in a large scale.

Seeing it all done in front of me gave me lots of inspiration from not only a sustainability perspective but also a teaching one. The first instance of the sustainability is important to me and also my major project as I am working alongside Circular & Co who follow the similar process as mentioned before. This gave me the idea of, ‘what if my product could be made from this process (as seen below) the outcomes are really creative and can feature different colours which give every persons container its own uniqueness.

Not only that but the teaching side of the MakerSpace was really interesting to me because it was run by one product design teacher and the students within as it is an afterschool club. I want to follow the same kind of style as a teacher leaving an impact on the students I teach by bringing this creativeness to the classroom and help engage the students just as the MakerSpace teacher has done.