What is “Decycling”?

Imagine all the plastic you’ve ever used in your life - every water bottle, every wrapper, every bag, every container. It probably adds up to a lot more than any of us are comfortable with. Even if (and that’s a big IF) every piece of plastic you’ve gone out of your way to put in the recycling bin was truly recycled as promised, that virgin material would degrade to the point of being unusable in only a few recycling cycles.

Contrary to what that “chasing arrows” symbol on the bottom of all your plastic trash suggests, recycling is not an infinite process. However, the lifetime of the plastic we throw out is practically infinite. So, what is to be done with a waste material that is dangerous, permanent, and terribly ubiquitous?

At The Reclamation Factory, we don’t believe in in recycling plastic - we believe in decycling it. Instead of reusing plastic in single-use containers or as short-use, built-to-fail products, we imagine a future where that plastic is locked-up in long-use or permanent-use applications like community infrastructure, construction, or hardware built with repair in mind.

Decyling doesn’t solve our plastic problem. That can only be done by terminating virgin plastic production all together and rethinking our quick-fix economy. But a decycling mindset does offer a path towards reframing the plastic waste we’re already struggling with as a potential resource. What could we build with a free material as abundant as plastic? Perhaps, with the right tools, we can turn our plastic pollution into a source material for building our future.