Happy New Year

2 January 2024

OLD (habits) and NEW (connections)  

In my quest for plastic waste, there are the regular habits like my traditional New Year's walk in search of plastic fireworks waste. This year too, there are quite a few blue caps (since 2015 in my neighbourhood) from the infamous Cobras. I also regularly make a diversion through my neighbourhood to fish out plastic crates, laundry baskets, buckets among the dumped household goods.

Furthermore, I cannot do without my regular connections such as Janneke de Lange, who has built up her own network of collectors, and Joris Somers, who collected a large quantity of blue pipette tip holders at his place at Sanquin Blood Supply's NSS lab at the end of the year. 

Fortunately, new connections are also coming in, which is really needed now because the scale of this work for the Groninger Museum is a lot bigger than usual. Erwin Wevers of Euro Mouldings had noticed my request for blue plastic waste on LinkedIn and put me in touch with Harald Buitenhuis of Cleaning Twente. At this company, they clean tankers, tank containers and plastic packaging. On all fronts, a great afternoon in which Harald and Erwin took all the time for me - thanks for that! We had an interesting and informative conversation about plastic waste recycling and the fundamental question of what should actually be considered waste. We were then given an extensive tour of the immense site with an abundance of plastic waiting to be shredded and reused. As the price of virgin (new) plastic is still very low, the stock seems to be increasing rather than decreasing for the time being. Finally, we visited the 'laundrette' and shredding department.  And of course, I had the opportunity to pick out and take away some more blue plastic waste.