Master of selection - creative plastic upcycling
Plastic Cup Society has developed a precise waste-sorting method that separates and cleans riverine materials for upcycling, enabling 50% of collected waste to be recycled, while also working toward a certification-ready system and AI-powered sorting technology to support circular material flows and river-friendly product creation.
Effective material selection is essential for turning waste into valuable industrial feedstock and create upcycling opportunities. Plastic Cup Society has developed and applies a rigorous sorting methodology that separates recyclable materials, such as metals, plastics (PE, PET, PP), paper, and glass (and many more) - based on their material purity. This ensures that recovered fractions are clean, usable, and economically valuable, even immediately after sorting. By maximising resource recovery and minimising contamination (e.g. from oil), the initiative demonstrates how civil-led actions can contribute to systemic change in waste management, supporting the goals of pollution reduction and circular material flows. Fourteen different wastestreams are defined, and based on a 420-tonnes experiment, 50% of the riverine waste is recyclable.
Currently, Plastic Cup Society has been working on to establish a certification-ready plastic separation and management system, from collected waste to the final product that can be certified by an independent body securing that the items made from this plastic are riverine based. Additionally, by using machine learning and artificial intellingence, an automatic waste separator is under development.
This sorting method also provides our plastic workshop with secondary raw materials turn into different riverine gadgets such as carabiners and rulers, available in our webshop.
Aquatic Plastic
The transnational river cleanup handguide
pdf ~ 4.7
Projects
Working together with our partners, we have developed technologies to enhance river saving.
