Is Local Plastic Having Its Farmers Market Moment?

There's a ritual that has developed over the last two years. At some point in almost every social engagement, there's a handover. Someone arrives with a bag, a box, a bundle — saved plastic, sometimes sorted by colour, offered with a kind of pride that I've come to love deeply. Every handover happens with a story.

This one was at the brewery.

A friend — someone whose summers are now reliably swallowed whole by wildfire season — had saved me some colourful stuff and she was excited about it. Her parents had hosted a neighbourhood water fight earlier in the year and set aside the plastic for Delve. She had a few bags of water balloon hose connectors, the ones that come with those rapid-fill kits, neon and fiddly.

The colours were outrageously good. Acid green, hot pink, electric yellow. This was a great score.

Shredded water fight plastic waste, collected and handed over to Delve by a friend.

It's not just her. Across every platform, I get regular messages from people with a stockpile — wondering whether I've tried campaign signs, or if they need to cut out labels, or checking in on the resin codes again. My stepfather is one of the most ardent — always meticulously sorted and cut to size. I've built a little stand at the end of my driveway to make it easier for people to drop off.

Left: Delve's plastic drop off station. Right: Shredded plastic in the mobile recycling trailer.

It started with family. Then friends. Then strangers. This week, RecycleBC asked if Delve wanted to be added to their database of recyclers.

It's rippling outwards. And I think it's rippling for a reason that goes beyond goodwill.

Plastic is miraculous. It is lightweight, durable, reshapeable — it has revolutionized medicine, food safety, construction, manufacturing. The world runs on it. It is also, at its core, a petrochemical product. Its price is tied directly to oil, to feedstock costs, to the stability of global supply chains. 

This month, as conflict disrupted the Strait of Hormuz, virgin resin prices jumped as buyers sought to secure supply. The Plastics Exchange recorded its highest weekly transaction volume in its 25-year history. A reminder of the petrochemical dependency of the supply chain. The plastic sitting in bags at the end of my driveway — your #2 and #5, your HDPE and polypropylene — is the same material that just became more expensive to produce from scratch. A reminder that even the most ordinary materials are only as stable as the systems that produce them. Food taught us that lesson already. Is plastic next?

I've seen empty grocery store shelves three times in the last five years — during the pandemic, and subsequent natural disasters that saw disruption from wildfire and flooding to transport corridors. That feeling doesn't leave you. In the Cariboo, local food that used to seem expensive relative to grocery store imports started making sense in a different way — what was once an ethical or ideological decision is becoming an economic one. 

Things I've known to be labelled as “alternative” — buy local, farmers markets, upcycling, mutual aid — are, if not already mainstream, becoming increasingly more common. Economics are shifting the equation, and people's experiences are signalling instability in ways that headlines and reports about climate change cannot.

Photo courtesy of BC Farmers Market Trail / bcfarmersmarkettrail.com

I started Delve as a creative way to take tangible action — to find a path forward that included hope and the climate crisis in the same sentence. I sometimes give myself whiplash between "Delve makes recycled plastic products" and "Delve is working to change systems." Both are true. I named the business Delve because recycling opens onto so many different themes: technology, community systems, creativity, capacity, design, waste, investment, and beyond. It’s a rich environment to work in.

Resilience keeps coming up. In the handovers, in the network, in the reasons people are saving plastic in the first place. At first I thought Delve’s relation to resilience was in our teaching community how to create things from plastic waste. But the ripples keep growing. Diverted plastic, yes — and also economic diversification, design thinking applied to real problems, skill building, technical capacity, new ways of working. The possibilities keep expanding outward.

This week I made combs. Neon, candy-coloured, brilliant — pressed from that water fight plastic. Acid green, hot pink, electric yellow. Diverted waste from landfill, started conversations about systems and resilience — and am starting to see sales. An important part of this proof of concept.

______________________________

Delve Recycled is a micro-recycling sustainability studio based in Williams Lake, BC. We collect #2 and #5 plastics from our community, process them in-studio, and turn them into functional products, workshops, and community programming. Everything we make starts with something someone almost threw away.

• Shop recycled plastic products — combs, wall hooks, and more — at delverecycled.ca

• Sign up for the Delve Dispatch, our monthly newsletter, here. 

• Delve will soon be listed on the RecycleBC recycler database — a province-wide directory helping BC residents find drop-off options for hard-to-recycle plastics. Check out the listing here.

• Have #2 or #5 plastic to drop off? DM us or visit delverecycled.ca to find out how.