Currently, US  plastic recycling has a success rate of only 5%, equating to 48 million tons of plastic waste ending up in landfills or nature. This failure is due to the  long relay race of recycling handoffs which lacks transparency, usually ends in landfills and if it does work, only produces more single use plastic. Instead we are working to implement our own recycling service that does it all, starting from scratch, to learn the problems of the field and work hands-on to test our assumptions.

After many failures and lessons learned, I’m happy to share that we have set up an operational recycling program in Charlottesville where we take #5 plastic, the plastic type usually found as bottle caps and yogurt containers, but for us it’s in the form of pipette boxes from UVA research labs. A common waste stream in labs across the country. Due to a lack of #5 plastic recycling in Charlottesville, UVA would have sent these boxes to North Carolina to be processed. Through our established process, UVA collects, sorts, shreds, and melts this waste in our one stop shop to transform this wasted waste into a usable form. We started with this simple form of plastic, these boxes, to perfect the process before opening to consumer waste. Since receiving the shredding machinery in 2023 from a Jefferson Trust grant, we have shredded 1300 lbs of #5 plastic waste, and are now looking to build out our manufacturing capabilities.

In Fall 2024, we collaborated with JT Bachman and the UVA Architecture school’s ARCH 5500: Processing the Anthropocene. This course had students learn our recycling process through sorting boxes, shredding and crushing the waste into refined shreds, experimenting with melting and extruding techniques, creating their own 3ft x 3ft sheet of plastic, and constructing a final build from the recycling plastic for a final review. Bachman executed an excellent incorporation of the recycling process we have worked to create, and plans to teach the course Fall 2025.

Junk Labz

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