Irena works as product designer / educational trainer of Precious Plastic Portugal and is part of the team since 2018. On the one hand she is responsible for design development, prototyping and fabrication of recycled plastic objects, and on the other hand she is an educational trainer for plastic recycling with Precious Plastic machines, organising recycling workshops in Portugal but also around the world.
Product Design with Precious Plastic
Customized product development – finding ways to reuse waste and transform it into a unique new product.
As maker and product designer she research about the material plastic and she tests out the limits of transformation in order to use recycled plastic as new raw material to design new sustainable products.
International collaborations with NGOs
Setting up plastic recycling workshops in collaboration with NGOs in Africa – São Tomé, Mozambique and Egypt – in order to empower local communities to operate the machine and raise awareness about the potential that lies in upcycling plastic waste.
Precious Plastic
Precious Plastic is a global community of hundreds of people working towards a solution to plastic pollution.
Precious Plastic is an open hardware plastic recycling project and is a type of open source digital commons project. The project was started in 2013 by Dave Hakkens and is now in its fourth iteration.
We are part of the Precious Plastic community since 2016 and have produced and sold more around 150 Precious Plastic machines, we made many educational trainings and set up workshops in different countries from Portugal to Africa.
Precious Plastic Portugal
Precious Plastic Portugal is based in OPO`LAB in Porto and we are fabricating Precious Plastic machines since 2016. We have sold more than 150 machines worldwide .
Besides we are developing a serie of activities, sharing the knowledge and possibilities how to recycle plastic and start working with the Precious Plastic machines.
Part of our expertise is making prototypes and fabricating small production series We also offer design consultancy for the fabrication of new customized Precious Plastic moldes and product development.
Project Info
Design & Production of the product
Project in collaboration with Precious Plastic Portugal
Year: 2018 ongoing
Design Approach
The approach of this project was designing and actually producing a useful product for the daily day usage by transforming plastic waste into something new appealing.
Production & Material
Made out of recycled plastic (PP and PE) from bottle caps in a wide range of colours.
Produced by manually injection using Precious Plastic machines – locally produced in Porto, Portugal.