This California Family Turns Hard-to-Recycle Plastic Into Furniture, and They Just Helped Build Desks for Students in Malawi

Most of us have stared at a plastic lid or clamshell, realized our city won’t take it, and tossed it anyway. Peninsula Precious Plastics decided that wasn’t good enough. The San Carlos, California nonprofit, run by Nick Schick and his parents David and Andrea, collects the thermoplastics that conventional recycling ignores, shreds them into granules, and heat-presses them into furniture, combs, keyrings, and clipboards. Their goal is sequestering that plastic into reusable objects before it breaks down into microplastics in landfills.

The operation runs on community power. Local groups divert their difficult plastics to the nonprofit, and Nick says the best part is the students, engineers, artists, and out-of-the-box thinkers who show up with new ideas for reducing plastic waste. It’s a family project that turned into a neighborhood project, and then into something bigger.

That something bigger reached Malawi. Sofie Roux’s nonprofit was building solar-powered classrooms and needed desks, so the Schicks provided press machines, and David Schick traveled overseas to help install and operate them. Now students have desks made from locally gathered plastic that would have otherwise ended up in the environment.

What’s the hardest item in your house to recycle? Tell us in the comments.