This New At-Home Appliance Turns Your Plastic Bags Into Recyclable Blocks — And Later, Park Benches

This New At-Home Appliance Turns Your Plastic Bags Into Recyclable Blocks — And Later, Park Benches

This New At-Home Appliance Turns Your Plastic Bags Into Recyclable Blocks — And Later, Park Benches Even the most eco-friendly among us struggle with recycling soft plastics. You know — the grocery bags, Ziplocs, bubble wraps, food wrappers, and cling wrap that you don’t want to toss but are notoriously difficult to recycle.  And there’s a reason these materials are so ubiquitous. They’re lightweight, flexible, and cheap to produce. This makes them a go-to material for packaging our everyday items.  But they remain hard to recycle in traditional systems, slipping through sorting processes, clogging machinery, and simply being rejected by most recycling facilities. Soft plastics are a challenge to recycle. Photo courtesy of Clear Drop This challenge motivated Texas engineer Ivan Arbouzov to create Clear Drop, a startup dedicated to transforming household waste. And they’ve just rolled out a breakthrough product: the Soft Plastic Compactor. It looks like a simple stainless steel trash can, bu…