About Delve

Delve Recycled is an experiment undertaken by Emma Swabey as one step in her journey to live wholly as a garbage queen. Starting with a sawed apart waffle maker, Emma traded her way up to hacked paper shredder, pizza oven and wobbly shop press. She is experimenting with crafting functional plastic items, amassing hoards of #2 (PP) and #5 (HDPE) plastic (thank you friends & family), searching for stable (clean, label free) local plastic streams & working to make #preciousplastic machines accessible in western Canada to rural communities.

Through Delve, Emma is capturing unrecyclable HDPE and PP plastics to transform into a line of functional items. Winter 23/24 saw production of ski-scrapers. Spring/Summer 2024 will bring an upgrade in machines & production starting on hair combs! Forever thankful to the work of the inventors, innovators, collaborators in the Precious Plastic Universe - check out their website for a dose of the same inspriation that got Emma really bouncing forward on this journey.

The pull into micro-scale plastic recycling was inescapable after several pauses in local recycling due to pandemic and natural disaster (fire & flood). Testing and trialling with plastic continues to be an excellent way of channeling climate anxiety, consumer guilt into something generative.

Emma believes that plastic is precious, and that exploring recycling as a craft and connection point offers all sorts of opportunities. Big change is possible.

Learn more about Emmas work on her portfolio page. She's currently working on migrating her Ten Ten Worms vermicomposting website into this Delve site... stay tuned!