A team of Ohio State students has won $25,000 from the 2018 Ford College Community Challenge, which will allow them to build machines able to recycle and reuse plastic.

The group, named Buckeye Precious Plastic, is building four different machines designed to turn old plastic into usable items and received the award in July.

“[The grant] would give our initiative more opportunities, more access to resources and made it easier for our initiative to grow in members,” said Dustin Goetz, a group member and third-year mechanical engineering major.

The grant from the Ford Motor Company Fund, which sponsors the challenge, was recommended by a fellow student. The team filled out an application, and after being selected as one of 20 finalists, submitted a video detailing the project.

The Ford College Community Challenge “invites students worldwide to partner with organizations in their communities to design projects, addressing critical needs of their community,” according to its website.

Buckeye Precious Plastic was one of 10 winning groups from colleges across the country, including Purdue University and University of California, Berkeley.

Their efforts were inspired by the Precious Plastic program, an organization started by David Hakkens from the Netherlands in 2013 that aspires to find a solution to plastic pollution. The Precious Plastic website provides instructions for building a multitude of different machines designed to reuse plastic.

The four machines — a shredder, an extruder used in 3D printing, an injector and a compressor — were all built using recycled items and can be used in tandem.

First, the shredder breaks down plastic into flakes which can then be used by the other three machines to create a final product.

The extruder compresses flakes into a continuous line of plastic, which can be used to make items such as filament for a 3D printer, while the injector and compressor both heat flakes to be used in molds, with the injector being suited for small objects and the compressor for larger objects.

“We get most of our materials from recycling places so we’ve been junk diving a few times,” Brian Waibl Polania, a third-year mechanical engineering major and member of the team, said in a press release.

Chris Chia, a group member and third-year biochemistry major, said the team needed funding to continue building the machines after they began the project in March.

The team hopes that its efforts will help increase the amount of plastic reused and recycled on Ohio State’s campus.

“On campus the only thing that’s recyclable right now is bottle-shaped plastics,” said Tom Reeves, director of energy management and sustainability at Ohio State. “What I got excited about when I heard about Buckeye Precious Plastic is that they’re taking a stab at all these hard-to-recycle items and doing what they can to fix that problem. That’s a problem that’s not just affecting us here at Ohio State but across the country.”

The members of Buckeye Precious Plastic also aim to have a positive impact on the environment not just on campus, but globally.

“There’s a giant float in the middle of the Pacific about the size of Texas leaking chemicals into our environment,” Chia said. “So our goal is just to try to do as much as we can to reduce the plastic that’s out there right now, to keep it in use, but to still try to keep it out of the environment.”

The group continues to work on assembling the machines and was recently able to acquire a room in Smith Lab, where they will continue construction.