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Plastics: They’re convenient, ubiquitous and now a considerable environmental problem thanks to their slow decomposition rate, ties to fossil fuels and association with disposable goods that end up polluting the planet in both macro and micro forms.
When buying something made of plastic, “you’re committing to something that lasts for 500 years,” said David Schick, co-founder of the award-winning nonprofit Peninsula Precious Plastics. “So if you’re gonna accept the convenience of plastic, then you need to accept the burden of plastic.”
For Peninsula Precious Plastics and its associates, that means saving plastics from being tossed into landfills and instead remaking them into products that are intended to last. It also means educating the community about the issue. The idea is to treat plastics not as disposable, but as a resource that should be used as thoughtfully and responsibly as possible.
The San Carlos-based educational nonprofit works with students, artists, entrepreneurs and civic groups to facilitate ways to upcycle plastic, find opportunities for developing creative design and STEM skills, and spread awareness of the plastic waste problem. It’s headquartered in a warehouse that serves as a community maker space; sharing techniques and ideas is a crucial part of the organization’s ethos.
While many of us toss our plastic waste into recycling bins, only around 9% of plastic actually ends up being recycled, Peninsula Precious Plastics co-founder Andrea Schick said, and much of what is accepted for recycling ends up shipped overseas.
“We can really actually make a significant dent locally by having groups come in and bring clean plastic and make it into items,” she said.
Making the process personal
At periodic “meet and melt” events with Peninsula Precious Plastics, participants clean, sort, shred and remake plastic into all kinds of new products, getting a personal, hands-on understanding of the issues – and the possibilities.
“One of the things I really like about our work is being able to interact with people in such a way that’s more than just a presentation. It’s being able to have people physically make something out of plastic, and that is so much more memorable than … any slideshow or any science demonstration that we could do,” co-founder and CEO Nick Schick said.
Colorful confetti-patterned clipboards, combs, holiday ornaments, animal-shaped keychains, flower pots, furniture and elements of art installations are among the items created by Peninsula Precious Plastics-associated makers. These products are sometimes sold as fundraisers for organizations like Mountain Parks Foundation (look for their banana slug-shaped products in the Nature Store at Henry Cowell State Park.)
And those items can be aesthetically and creatively satisfying as well, giving makers the chance to flex their creativity and showcase the colorful and artistic potential of plastic waste.
“I don’t tend to think of plastic in a positive way at all, so it’s refreshing to see, ‘Oh, there’s actually something beautiful and useful that you can make out of this repurposed plastic,'” Andrea Schick said, holding up her favorite multicolored clipboard.
While Peninsula Precious Plastics does accept donations of plastic, storage room at the space is limited, and the larger goal is for the community to take an active role.
“We want the people who bring the material to be involved in the process as much as possible, because we want to make it personal,” David Schick said.
Peninsula Precious Plastics was founded by the San Mateo-based Schick family, with the idea sparked in 2020 when Nick Schick – then an Aragon High School student and now an environmental science major at University of California, Los Angeles – and his after-school tech club wanted to do something about climate change.
They came across Precious Plastic, an organization started in the Netherlands that offers open-source tools and information for combatting the plastic problem, and realized there were steps they could take locally. Once the Schicks started collecting their own plastic waste from daily life, the scale of the problem became evident.
“We were amazed by how quickly our family alone helped fill up so much space with plastic that we used purchasing groceries,” Andrea Schick said.
Nick Schick created plastic clipboards to donate to Laguna Honda Hospital as his Eagle Scout project, and Peninsula Precious Plastics, inspired by the international Precious Plastic movement, kept on sourcing equipment, networking and growing into the expanded organization it is today. Andrea Schick said she loves being able to connect with makers locally and globally who are working on innovative ways to tackle the plastic problem and share their ideas with others around the world.
In January, the nonprofit received a 2026 Sustainability Award from Sustainable San Mateo County. It’s worked with many organizations, including the California Academy of Sciences, the California Environmental Literacy Initiative and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and with businesses like Cocoplum Sunglasses, which uses recycled pill bottles, and Swellcycle Surfboards.
Peninsula Precious Plastics’ San Carlos maker space includes shredding machines, an oven, injection molds and all sorts of other equipment. Students and other makers 13 and over are trained on how to use them and are able to design their own product ideas. Becoming an official nonprofit organization allows Peninsula Precious Plastics to receive grants, which helps fund expenses like the electrical costs of running its machinery.
Near the entrance of the workshop is an arrangement of bins, each filled with tiny colorful plastic bits, organized by color. If it looks a lot like a candy store, that’s because the bins were formerly used to display varieties of jelly beans at the now defunct Talbot’s Toyland in San Mateo, then at Byrd’s Filling Station, whose owner later donated them to Peninsula Precious Plastics.
Plastic types are categorized by number, and Peninsula Precious Plastics works with all kinds of everyday items, such as bottle caps, takeout containers and yogurt cups.
“We encourage people to bring us clean, dry, plastic with the numbers 2, 4, and 5 on it because of all the plastics – they have the lowest VOCs (volatile organic compounds),” which are harmful to human health, David Schick said. A device that scans materials to decipher what type of plastic they contain is used when a number isn’t visible.
Plastic’s present and future
Outreach to schools and students continues to be a crucial part of Peninsula Precious Plastics’ mission. The nonprofit is currently working with many Bay Area schools and getting more requests all the time, according to Andrea Schick. Many creative design projects have come from teen volunteers.
“What I love about having students at our shop is they ask so many good questions about plastics,” she said. Students who work with Peninsula Precious Plastics as youngsters often go on to spread what they’ve learned when they move on to college, or come back when they can.
Groups like Peninsula Precious Plastics operate on a micro scale, but there’s no reason why these types of practices can’t be expanded on a larger scale, he said. He gave the example of the ubiquitous Home Depot buckets, which are made from new plastic but could easily be made of recycled plastic instead. It’s currently cheap to manufacture new plastic products, he said. There needs to be a mind and policy shift to prioritize reuse.
“I imagine a future where the San Carlos Recology building has a facility, a very small one, a fraction of the size of what their current operation is, that processes, sorts, and cleans plastic, shreds it, and turns it into all sorts, all manner of things,” he said.
“We do recognize that, you know, plastic’s not going away anytime soon. … If we ended plastic production tomorrow, thousands, tens of thousands of people would die from lack of medicine,” he continued. “We do need plastic in many areas. We’ve just become dependent on it, and it’s gonna take generations for us to become free of it.”
Making choices about plastic is not something everyone has the privilege to easily do, David Schick acknowledged.
“There are communities in the world that don’t have a choice … this is the only way they’ll either get water or food … they’re burdened with just trying to make it day to day,” he said. “So those of us that can, should think about it and should do something about it, and that’s really a core part of our message. If we’re able to, we should be doing it.”
The ReCap Project
Brandon Lin is an 11th grader at Aragon who restarted the Precious Plastic club at school (following the one Nick Schick had founded a few years before). Lin’s father, Ken Lin, is a physician in San Carlos and came home one day dismayed about the amount of plastic waste he noticed at the medical office where he works – in particular plastic needle caps.
Brandon and Ken wondered if they could turn this waste stream into a circle by reusing the plastic and donating what they made back to the clinic. That’s how the ReCap Project was born, and since 2023 it has so far kept around 850,000 pieces of plastic out of landfills and incinerators and saved around 2,380 pounds of plastic, according to Brandon Lin.
It’s expanded from San Carlos to clinics in surrounding cities, including San Mateo and Burlingame. The needle caps collected are processed at Peninsula Precious Plastics, then turned into clipboards that are given to clinic staff who help collect the needle caps. (A Hillsdale High School Precious Plastic club member, Kayla Somoza, works on collecting plastic waste from Kaiser Permanente facilities, according to Andrea Schick.)
Brandon Lin is also a graduate of the San Mateo County Youth Climate Ambassador Leadership Program and part of the Silicon Valley Youth Climate Team.
“I think a lot of people don’t really think about sustainability when they’re going about their day-to-day tasks,” he said. He hopes to help change that by spreading awareness, as well as through hands-on projects. The ReCap Project’s website offers information for clinics that would like to join, and he said he’s heard from people not only locally, but in Southern California and the Midwest as well.
“It’s really cool seeing people all around the country be really interested,” he said.
Rubbish Bags and Inventurous
Tara de la Garza is a member of the Palo Alto Public Art Commission and the Cubberley Artist Studio Program. Originally from Australia, de la Garza now lives on the Peninsula. She’s been addressing the issue of plastic in her artwork for some time, but in the past few years, she realized she wanted to do even more to both spread awareness and directly take action locally.
“I guess I felt frustrated by the reach of my message. And so I decided to start the nonprofit Inventurous as a way to inspire a community as well as get more people involved in collecting especially difficult-to-recycle plastic,” she said.
Inventurous works with Peninsula Precious Plastics and shares the mission of engaging people to help create valuable items out of waste plastic, as well as making techniques and processes open source, so they can be replicated in other communities.
Inventurous’ first big project is brand Rubbish Bags – purses and tote bags designed by de la Garza and made from bags that would otherwise end up as rubbish.
“What I really wanted to do was creatively recycle locally. So what can we do with our materials locally that inspire people to, firstly, use less, and secondly, to think of it as a resource, not as a waste stream?” she asked herself.
She identified that newspaper delivery sleeves are particularly difficult for municipal waste companies to recycle (they tend to clog the machines), so she enlisted community members and groups, including in the Greenmeadow neighborhood of Palo Alto and local libraries, to collect bags from New York Times deliveries specifically, which come in a distinctive blue hue.
“So there are places now that are collecting for me, and not only is that great for me because it’s a single-stream source that is clean, it’s also just getting people to sort of subconsciously think about what they’re doing with their waste stream and that’s the bigger goal: behavioral change,” she said.
She started out by making wallets, inspired by designs she saw on the Precious Plastic network, then wanted to go larger. In her Palo Alto studio, she creates pleather (plastic leather) material by heating and pressing the shredded plastic, then assembling it into bags along with upcycled leather from old couches and other bits and pieces (at the time of this interview, she had recently been given a large supply of black plastic from Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, which has a pleasing texture when pressed.)
Rubbish Bags are currently for sale online, as well as sometimes through the local sustainable goods store Ethos, which has branches in Los Altos, Los Gatos and Capitola.
Prices range depending on the design and how many hours of work goes into each bag. The bucket tote model, for example, starts at $96 while the “mini” model starts at $196, with options for add-ons such as crossbody chains.
“A lot of people who buy them are people who collect bags or who have some interest in sustainability as well as fashion,” she said.
While some of the machinery feels high-tech, much of the bag-making process also utilizes old-fashioned design principles, leathercraft techniques and manual work.
“I think there’s something charming about that, and also when people see what it is we’re doing here, they can sort of see there’s a potential to do a lot of things,” she said.
The HDP and LDP plastics de la Garza works with are the least toxic types, she said. “We’re not burning it, we’re fusing it. We’re melting it at a point that it doesn’t release any VOCs,” she said. “But even still, I just make sure that I have filtration systems so that it’s absolutely clean.”
She also enjoys helping others realize their plastic project ideas, holding open days in her studio several times a year for people to come in, explore the materials and make recycled treasures of their own. She’s been designing a soap holder, inspired by the thought of “How can I get people, instead of buying plastic jars, plastic bottles to put shampoo in, to use a shampoo bar instead?” de la Garza said.
“Just looking at little ways that we can do that, get that behavior change happening in the community,” she added.
‘Everybody can do something’
The long-term hope “is for a future where our business is redundant and we no longer have the materials to make creative projects from plastic,” Inventurous’ website states. In the meantime, all of these local organizations offer ways for the community to get involved.
“The absolute best way to help us, hands down, is we need volunteers to come sort and shred our plastics,” Nick Schick said.
Don’t discount the small steps. “As is the case for a lot of different activism or ways to improve your life, you have to do what you can,” he said. “If you see an opportunity to use your water bottle more or pack your lunch instead of getting it in the to-go container, then go for it.”
Ultimately, “for those that can choose, they should not choose plastic, whenever they can. That’s really the message,” David Schick said. “Everybody can do something, even if they can’t come here to help us or they can’t donate to us, they can at the very least think twice about buying something made out of plastic.”
Peninsula Precious Plastics; Instagram: @peninsulapreciousplastics.
The ReCap Project; Instagram: @the.recap.project.
Inventurous; Instagram: @inventurous.
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