The ones who have just created the REVIVACK Certified® and the Revivack Take Back System are the same people who created POPSICASE, a startup that makes phone cases out of fishing nets, which can be used over and over again. Why this project?
A year ago we noticed that people were buying POPSICASE a second time. What would they do with the old case?
Recycling plants can’t do magic.
If they were to throw it away, it would irretrievably become waste, because recycling plants receive thousands of tonnes of objects every day that they cannot process for a very specific reason: discarded items, mostly produced from pieces of different materials, arrive whole, unsorted and assembled so that it is not possible to recover them properly without first disassembling them.
“It is not possible to shred a shoe, or a handbag or an umbrella and expect a useful powder to come out of it”.
We are not talking about single-use plastic packaging, a drama that is beginning to be tackled from many angles and which, fortunately, is starting to have feasible solutions, but about everyday objects that we throw away and which cannot be thrown into the yellow bin.
It is not possible to crush a shoe, or a bag or an umbrella and expect a useful powder to come out of it, made from Teflon granules, polypropylene and aluminium, because the products are manufactured from single materials or mixtures of them, with specific properties. Therefore “RECYCLING” is not about passing the whole article through a machine, but it is necessary to make a previous effort to separate the different parts.
The key to avoiding waste is to separate the parts.
With this idea in mind, we had it easy. One-click was all it took to completely recover the two parts, a recycled plastic case made with Nylon 6 from fishing nets, and a recycled aluminum handle from scrap.
We asked our recycling plant friends in Barcelona – here you can take a look at the process to produce a POPSICASE – if after separating the recycled plastic cover from the aluminum handle, it was possible to crush it and use it again. The answer was a resounding YES!
At that moment we realized that we could finally talk about the circular economy since our case, no matter how many years it was used for, would never become waste. We can RECYCLE the plastic cover over and over again, and we can RENEW the handles, which normally are in good condition and don’t need to be melted down to be re-injected. We began to practice the R culture!
The Circular Economy is not just about producing with recycled material, it’s about thinking that what you design and manufacture should never become waste.
In May 2020 we launched our Popcycling case return campaign. For a year and a half, we have been receiving dozens of cases from different parts of the world, and a very high percentage have returned to trust Popsicase.
This experience has led us to devise this take-back system based on a standard that guarantees that brands can receive their objects to put all their efforts into their subsequent recovery.
The Circular Economy is everyone’s business
We are aware of how disruptive this project is. We know that the culture of return and recovery of objects is too new to ask for radical changes now. However, we have to start looking in that direction.
We are producers, recyclers and social entrepreneurs. We can enourage the circular economy, but we all have to do it together!
This is our new project which we invite everyone to join – we must do it with a learning mentality, bearing in mind that no one is to blame for this situation of ecological imbalance. Neither the companies are bad nor the users irresponsible, we just happen to be living in a complex system that has brought us to the edge of the abyss.
Having read this… will you become revivers?