Breck Create champions responsible plastic use through creative innovation, encouraging sustainable practices and eco-conscious design solutions.
Breck Create’s Precious Plastics studio in Breckenridge reached a significant milestone this winter, diverting 10,000 pounds of plastic from the landfill since opening in Colorado’s high country in 2021. The program focuses on transforming waste into art while raising awareness about the amount of plastic the local community discards.
Common items, such as inexpensive sleds sold at local stores, often become the program’s main material. When these sleds break on the town’s hills, the fragments are rarely recycled due to the difficulty of reprocessing hard plastics. To address this, Breckenridge officials and Breck Create staff collect broken sleds and other rigid plastics, bringing them to the studio.
Sustainability Manager Jessica Burley explained that the process is detailed but rewarding. “They turn the plastic into small pellets and then create new pieces of art,” she said.
Program Director Jill Desmond highlighted the creativity involved: “Artists and designers are amazing at turning plastic into something new. The question becomes, what can you do with it? It helps people see plastic differently, changing the way they think about waste.”
Desmond noted that the initiative isn’t intended to solve the global plastic problem, but to encourage a shift in perspective toward reusing materials.
Community involvement is a key part of the project. Residents can volunteer, participate in collection events, or drop off cleaned plastics for reuse. While broken and discarded plastics continue to accumulate, the milestone demonstrates that local efforts can help keep materials in circulation.
Rigid plastics—like buckets and hoses—are difficult for standard recycling programs to process. Burley emphasized that keeping these items out of landfills saves space and reduces long-term costs for taxpayers.
At the Arts District campus, donated plastics are sorted, shredded, and melted using specialized equipment, then shaped into new objects or art pieces. The studio functions as a community “mix workspace,” offering workshops, classes, and open studio time where participants learn to turn waste into usable items.
The program is part of the global Precious Plastic network, which encourages small-scale, community-driven recycling solutions rather than large industrial systems. Many repurposed plastics are featured in exhibitions such as “Second Life,” where artists like Jodi Stewart display creations made from reclaimed sled fragments.
News Courtesy : CBS News