Redefining Plastic
The Mini Polyfloss Machine processes plastic waste into fibres suitable for insulation and garment making, and is intended for makers and small communities (image: Palta Studio).
The machine is tabletop-sized, with funnels and tubes like turrets and a handsome orange wheel. It looks as if it could have been plucked straight from a Wes Anderson film, and is equally playful in its premise: transforming waste plastic into candy floss-like fibres known as “Polyfloss”.
This is the Mini Polyfloss Machine, a new device designed to create its namesake material. Having a similar texture to wool, Polyfloss is a versatile recycled material whose applications range from building insulation to garment making, and even brick building when compressed. The technology debuted at the Royal College of Art’s 2012 degree show, presented by The Polyfloss Factory, a small group of students from the Innovation Design Engineering (IDE) programme, as a means to convert plastic waste into fibres. Since graduating, the team have continued their work as a startup, developing a semi-industrial-scale machine for humanitarian contexts, such as processing plastic to create insulation for migrant shelters in France and schools in Nepal. As a scaled-down version of the original machine, the new Mini Polyfloss has been designed with small maker communities and low-tech manufacturing in mind.
The machine processes plastic waste into thin fibres that resemble candy floss (image: Palta Studio).
Audrey Gaulard, one of the Polyfloss Factory’s four co-founders, reflects that her team originally dreamt of “having this magic recycling machine [where] you throw in your plastic chair and birth another one.” While instant object metamorphosis remains impossible, however, the startup’s ability to produce a new raw material from waste clutches at something of the same childlike optimism. Discarded consumer plastics such as bottles and container packaging are fed into the team’s machines, in which they are pressed through an extruder. Arriving hot and under pressure from the extruder, the plastic is then spun into thin, flossy fibres. The original, vibrantly coloured plastic is then stretched out into snowier hues that resemble the angel hair threads of candy floss.
While the new Mini Machine is intended for small-scale use, Gaulard explains that the original idea for the Polyfloss Machine came from the team’s concern around more widespread environmentally exploitative consumer relationships. “Why do we need to always extract petroleum and wood and oil when [plastic is] here, hanging out, polluting everything?” she says, highlighting a need to recontextualise the surplus of toxic waste. Within the “untouchable”, Polyfloss saw the potential for a low density, raw material: something “so fluffy [it] can be anything,” Gaulard explains. The technology has already been deployed at a recycling facility in Madagascar in place of more centralised waste management systems, but its material has also been used in disaster response projects in Syria, where the material is able to quickly provide insulation for temporary housing.
When heated in a mould, Polyfloss can be turned into bricks (image: Palta Studio).
The Polyfloss Factory have sort to combine their ecological goals with a sense of sociological consciousness, creating a recycling system that can be overseen and operated at a grassroots level. This holistic sustainability approach is aligned closely with environmental activist Murray Bookchin’s theory of social ecology, which views ecological problems as stemming from hierarchical societal structures. “Our present ecological problems cannot be clearly understood, much less resolved, without resolutely dealing with problems within society,” Bookchin argues in his essay ‘What is Social Ecology?’. When it comes to waste plastic in particular, Polyfloss pays heed to the roles that technological expansion and corporate self-interest play. “We wanted to work on low-tech manufacturing and accessibility,” Gaulard says. “We don't want it to be an elitist technology.”
In this vein, the shift towards the Mini Machine was prompted by demands from DIY communities and fab labs. “I’ve got this need, I've got this waste,” Gaulard summarises, “and I can't really have the big machine.” She suggests that a willingness to recycle is not a problem within society – instead, budgetary, spatial and infrastructural barriers are what prevents its adoption. A report published in 2023 by Cleanhub, for instance, found that a quarter of post-consumer plastic in the UK is sent abroad for reprocessing, since the country doesn’t have the proper infrastructure to manage its waste domestically, and instead relies on exporting the problem. As such, Polyfloss’s drive towards hyperlocalised pollution management strategies addresses the inextricable relationship between environmental, social and economic issues.
Polyfloss can be used as an insulation material for textiles or buildings (image: Palta Studio).
Bookchin warns that “green capitalism” tends to focus on “the symptoms of a grim social pathology,” instead of treating the pathology itself. Throughout their history of humanitarian work, for instance, Polyfloss has attended to the hierarchical class relationships that cause and exacerbate plastic pollution, treating this pathology head on. In Madagascar, for example, the organisation has provided training and technology to people who are employed to sort and manage waste exported from the West. These workers have used Polyfloss’s machines to earn extra income by cultivating their own circular economies around the fluffy fibres. While environmental issues cannot be reduced to one root social cause, it can be argued that class dynamics parallel a wider human entitlement to exploit nature. For a European company working alongside formerly colonised countries, Gaulard and her team are keenly aware of this dynamic. To ensure they “are a positive addition, not a disturbance,” their humanitarian work is underpinned by their drive “to be hyper local and make sure we answer the local needs.”
With environmental and social issues entangled as they are, it is unsurprising that Polyfloss’s waste management strategy has sought to proceed along a mutually beneficial path. The release of the Mini Machine, which is being funded by a kickstarter campaign, will grant small maker communities access to the technology, while also supporting the group’s more ambitious humanitarian initiatives. Gaulard says that the team is now about to embark on “the project of a lifetime,” having just signed with the United Nations military camp in South Sudan to open their first recycling centre. “It makes sense to have, in your lifetime, an innovation that can truly help people,” she says, “not just one take that's going to have an article in a design magazine.”
Words Catherine Spooner