KarunaNews Story

Soft plastic grocery bags, Ziplocs, bubble wraps, food wrappers, and cling wrap are notoriously difficult to recycle in traditional systems. So Texas engineer Ivan Arbouzov’s Clear Drop, a startup dedicated to transforming household waste, has just rolled out the Soft Plastic Compactor, which compacts soft plastics into easy-to-recycle blocks. Once the bin is full, the device uses heat and pressure to compress everything into a clean, dense block about the size of a shoebox. Each block has a prepaid shipping label, so you just send it in the mail, and it goes directly to a verified recycling partner where the materials are shredded and turned into reusable raw materials and are used to make things like park benches, decking, and waste containers. Arbouzov said that if just 1% of U.S. households adopted the new device, nearly 300,000 tons of soft plastic — or about 7.2 billion grocery bags — would be kept from landfills, oceans, and our food chain. The SPC requires a one-time investment of $200 and then a monthly $50 subscription fee. Customers receive three prepaid mailers every quarter — enough to recycle about one block per month — and can schedule pickups anytime. The device uses roughly $0.52 in monthly electricity costs for an average household.