The #PlasticForGood Challenge by Distributed Design Market Platform x Precious Plastic, co-funded project by Creative Europe, was an intensive experience promoting the crucial need to rethink the way we use plastics globally. The Precious Plastic community welcomed 15 DDMP creatives into their Basekamp in Eindhoven, the Netherlands from June 23rd – 29th to take part in the exciting design challenge. The profiles of the participants  varied from coders to designers & makers from all over the world. They had one objective: to produce a product out of recycled plastic to improve lives in one week!

See the just released documentary below and find out what exactly happened during the PxG Challenge by Distributed Design Market Platform & Precious Plastic!

Short documentary directed by Marcel Rodríguez. Shot by Manuela Reyes and Marcel Rodríguez. Music by Nehuen McAllister

Precious Plastic is well known for creating a very practical open source methodology to enable moving away from the reckless culture of single-use plastics and give a new, meaningful life to the tons and tons of used plastic already existing on our planet. Precious Plastics has evolved to be an inspirational global movement and a community working towards a solution to plastic pollution, started in 2013 by Dave Hakkens.

The five groups were lucky to work with the brand-new version 4 of the Precious Plastic machines to bring their imaginative designs to life. The official release of these machines will be in October at the Dutch Design Week. Part of the magic of the Precious Plastic process is that the recycled plastic sheets and beams have an attractiveness and a feel of high quality to them. At their best, the colorful, marbled plastics can emulate the look of stone, ceramics or even glass, when transparent.

Muchas Mantas by Team Orange

The five resulting products from the Plastic for Good workshop aimed to improve everyday lives are highly impressive. The variety and quality of the final products totally blew everyone involved away.  ‘Muchas Mantas‘ from Team Orange by Aniol López, Nikolas Kichler and Tom Meades is a modular tile system offering highly modifiable architectural solutions for façades or rooftops.

The ‘JIMGO’ from Team Green

The ‘JIMGO‘ from Team Green by Gisli Snaer, Vivien Roussel and Mattia Ciurnelli – a brilliant modifiable trailer which can be added to bikes which acts as a pop-up recycle and information point about plastic recycling.

The ‘Steedy’ from Team Blue

The ‘Steedy‘ from Team Blue by Ana Ferreira, Milo Mcloughlin and Emanuele Béla – a children’s rocker made from completely recycled plastic and locally sourced materials with fun, interchangeable heads.

‘Twist’ from Team Yellow

‘Twist‘ from Team Yellow by Marc Benito, Damien Ragoucy, Francisco Gómez – an interesting joinery technique which takes full advantage of the properties of plastic and therefore offering a wide range of design potentialities and combinations with other materials.

the ‘Aam Backpack‘ from Team Pink

The ‘Aam Backpack‘ from Team Pink by Nidhi Mittal, Moritz Wursow and Agustin Flowalistik – a backpack with an integrated table, which rather beautifully, provides opportunity to carry school books and transform into a desk.

With the Plastic For Good Challenge and other events and activities Distributed Design Market Platform aims to connect European designers, makers & the market. #DistributedDesign promotes alternatives to mass-production with a new approach to design which utilises global connectivity to move data, instead of product. We are extremely happy about the Plastic For Good Challenge as a showcase of  how passion for creating a better world combined with exceptional design skills produced such solid products in one week only. We thank everyone involved, let’s keep designing globally and producing locally! 

All of these fantastic products are completely open-source and can be downloaded from Wikifactory to be made in the nearest lab or at home with the Precious Plastic machines. See the Plastic For Good- documentary in our YouTube channel here.