Paddle boarding artist launches Precious Plastic recycling initiative to tackle ocean plastics

Artist and paddle boarder Sally Anderson explains her Precious Plastics recycling initiative.

Transcript

00:00 Okay then Sally, if you can just tell me about the Precious Plastics initiative and what

00:04 inspired you to get involved? So Precious Plastics is an international open source

00:08 network for small-scale plastic recycling. It's completely open source,

00:12 they share information about the machinery and best practice and how to

00:15 work with different types of plastic. I originally became interested because I'm

00:19 an artist and I was a bit concerned about the amount of plastic that was

00:22 going to waste in my studio going into my recycle bin without any real way to

00:25 trace that or find out whether it was really being recycled. And last year I

00:29 took part in an initiative called Sustainable Sunderland which was run by

00:33 Creative Hues and the University of Sunderland and that was for freelancers

00:36 and SMEs learning about climate change, ocean literacy and general

00:40 sustainability. And the two just came together really, I thought yeah I'm

00:45 really interested in a way to recycle my own plastics and my community plastics

00:50 in-house and just find a way for that all to be traceable and accountable

00:55 within my own practice. What sort of products are you going to make from the recycled

00:59 plastics? So initially I'm just going to be making bead jewellery, so I'm going to buy

01:03 an injection machine and a bead mould and I'm going to use my own plastic

01:07 waste, beach plastics from our local coastline and they're going to be

01:10 recycled into small bracelets and necklaces. Then after that we're going to

01:15 go on to making surfboard wax combs, rulers, hair combs, beard combs and then

01:21 as things develop I'm hoping to purchase some bigger machines that can make

01:24 things like furniture. Yeah there's all kinds of things if you have a look on

01:27 the precious plastics website but that's for further down the line.

01:30 Initially I'm going to be making just small items. I understand you've got some

01:33 first-hand experience of the kind of plastics you find in the ocean? Yeah

01:37 definitely, so I'm a paddle boarder around here, I'm regularly out at Whitburn and

01:42 Seaburn and like most surfers and beach users around here I do see unfortunately

01:47 a lot of plastic in the sea and that's been a real part of my inspiration to

01:50 get this done because I'm really interested in organising beach cleans

01:53 and seeing if we can take some of that plastic out the ocean.