When Polk County Recycling and Beautification told commissioners it could no longer run the local recycling center, it was easy to read it as a local problem. It isn’t. The same math that is closing our center has nearly shut down one of the most famous recycling projects on the planet.
That project is Precious Plastic, an open-source movement started in the Netherlands in 2013. The idea is simple and hopeful: publish free blueprints so anyone, anywhere, can build machines that shred and remold plastic waste into new products. It caught on. By 2023, the network counted more than 1,100 workspaces across 56 countries, employing over 500 people and generating roughly $3.7 million in community revenue.
By any measure, that is a movement. And yet, in 2025, the organization behind it published a post with a blunt title: “Precious Plastic is in trouble.” The core team was down to three people, burning through about 30,000 euros a quarter, with roughly six months of money left. The founder had to step back in to lead a rescue.
How does something so successful end up so broke? The answer is the same one Kari Miller, PCRB’s president, gave the commissioners: recycling is “a public service, not a business.”
Precious Plastic admits it plainly. The project, they wrote, “wasn’t designed to have a healthy financial model.” They gave everything away for free, survived on donations and the occasional lucky gift, and never built a way to pay their own bills. When an accident led to a two-year lawsuit, and they had no insurance, the legal fees nearly finished them. And the volunteers and staff who kept it running eventually needed steady paychecks and moved on.
The numbers tell the story. In Precious Plastic’s own global survey, only about 10 percent of workspaces were actually profitable, and just 21 percent could cover their own costs. Nearly seven in ten could not.
That is the hard truth behind PCRB’s closure. Community recycling almost never pays for itself. The value is real, keeping plastic and cardboard out of the landfill, but it shows up as a public good, not a profit. Even a worldwide network spanning 56 countries could not change that equation.
So this is not a Polk County failure. It is a structural reality of recycling everywhere.
Which raises the real question: if recycling cannot pay for itself, how do some communities keep it going anyway? Some do. In Part 3, we look at the towns and programs that cracked it and what they did differently.