Investigating the 61-pound machine that eats plastic and spits out bricks

The Verge · Mar 2, 2026 · Collected from RSS

Full Article

As a kid, I went door to door collecting cans to earn some pocket change. Today, I still take pride in recycling. I slice cardboard boxes down to size each Sunday, and make sure every viable plastic container winds up in my family’s recycling bins. Sometimes I even pull cellophane windows out of paper envelopes, just in case it’ll save a tree someday.In other words: I’m nearly the perfect customer for Clear Drop’s Soft Plastic Compactor, a gadget that turns all your unrecyclable plastic shopping bags, mailers, food packaging, and bubble wrap into a 3-pound brick that doesn’t need to be trashed.By bricking your plastic, the company claims it’ll no longer jam recycling equipment the way individual plastic bags often do. Just feed your plastics into this 61-pound bin and watch them magically disappear into its whirring slot. Wait for it to spit out a brick weeks later, drop it into a supplied bag, and let the US Postal Service whisk your guilt away.If only it were that easy!I’m Sean Hollister, and I’ve spent over a month with the Clear Drop system. My colleague, senior science reporter Justine Calma, has interrogated what happens to the bricks after that. Neither of us is fully convinced. The machine is clunky, the service pricey, and it may not even be a net positive for the environment.Like Juicero, the ill-fated $700 juice squeezing machine where humans could squeeze the juice pouches with their bare hands instead, I fear they haven’t thought this trash-squeezing machine through. Justine and I worry these tools might even encourage people to consume more disposable plastic — like Ryan A, a “verified buyer” of the Clear Drop, suggested three months ago:But unlike Juicero, this isn’t a solution in search of a problem. The problem exists. For a month, I really did have a way to keep plastic out of the landfill, and I feel guiltier than ever now I’m throwing that plastic back in the trash.The slot where you insert plastic.How Clear Drop worked for meby Sean HollisterFor $1,400 — one $200 down payment, then $50 a month for 24 months, nearly as much as I pay for garbage, recycling, and compost combined — a Clear Drop subscription buys you three things.First, the machine: a 27-inch tall compactor with a pair of auto-sensing motorized rollers inside its top-mounted slot, a heating element in its belly, and a stainless steel design that fits in with today’s typical kitchen trash cans. When you’ve filled it with loose plastic, it’ll slowly raise its platform that squishes it into shape; when it can’t fit any more, it’ll melt the outside of that brick to glue all the pieces together.Second, you get one prepaid mailer a month to ship your brick across the country, where partner Frankfort Plastics says it’ll get recycled into products like lawn edging and plastic lumber.Third, it comes with a two-year “comprehensive protection plan” that should cover repairs and even full replacements so long as you haven’t abused it — Clear Drop tells us it’ll even cover return shipping of the machine. (There’s also a 30-day trial with a full refund.)Once the two years are up, the compactor is yours to keep. But unless you can find a local recycler to take the bricks, you’ll have to start paying $15 to $20 per mailer, and you may be on your own for repairs. That gives me pause, partly because Clear Drop only has one public recycling partner in the entire country for this program, and partly because Clear Drop’s machine isn’t anywhere near as foolproof or repairable as I’d like.One of Sean’s bricks sitting atop the machine.At first, things went fairly well. I was pleased to find the compactor is a dumb gadget with no setup required, no Wi-Fi networks or firmware updates or apps to worry about. Just plug in a three-prong AC cable, then tap a couple touchpad buttons to choose between a child lock or fully automatic operation. I shoved in one plastic grocery bag after another, then snack wrappers and Ziplocs, working my way through every bit of disposable soft plastic in the house. I enjoyed feeding the machine, watching my plastics disappear.What plastics can Clear Drop take?While Sean spent some of his first days agonizing over which complicated plastics can go in the machine — Ziplocs with zipper handles? Potato chip bags with foil liners? Do I have to wash out cookie crumbs? — Clear Drop’s Matt Daly and Frankfort Plastics’ Sasi Noothalapati say it’s simpler than that. Recyclers like Frankfort can tolerate a certain percentage of contamination, and it has big magnets and other separation systems that can remove metal contaminants. “Even if an aluminum can gets into the block, it’s not a show killer for us,” says Noothalapati.The main no-nos are PVC plastics, like pipes and vinyl fabric; celluloid, like in guitar picks; and polystyrene, like in disposable plastic cups and food trays.Frankfort also says up to 2 percent paper contamination is okay, so we don’t have to worry about the impossible-to-remove labels on some plastic bags we get in the mail.For a day or so, I worried what might happen if my kids stuck a hand into the opening, because thin plastics almost need to touch the rollers before they’ll start to spin. But when I fed my own hand to the beast, the rubber rollers just gave me a firm squeeze before stopping automatically.But — perhaps to ensure that safety — the SPC won’t just power through my trash. It doesn’t have the strength to pop thick bubble wrap, let alone larger sealed air cushions or the few shopping bags that fill themselves with air as they’re sucked through. (I kept a utility knife nearby to poke holes.) But it also regularly comes to an abrupt halt with anything as thick as an Amazon bubble mailer, though I can hold down a button manually to force those through.A few days after I started using the machine, I had my first true jam. Ironically, the SPC did exactly what it’s supposed to prevent industrial recycling machines from doing: It got so much plastic twisted around its rollers that it gummed up the works. I couldn’t move those rollers forward or backward, there was seemingly no way to remove them without disassembling the whole machine, and Clear Drop suggested I should exchange it instead of working on it myself.Eventually, I cut away enough material with that utility knife to get it working again without an exchange — but I’ve had that same jam twice since, each time leaving more bits of plastic stuck in the rollers, adding more friction. After those three jams, the rollers are pausing more often with false positives.I don’t know why plastic gets stuck in the rollers, but I do notice it happens when the machine is nearly full, pressing up against the bottom of the rollers. Perhaps the new piece I’m inserting gets deflected back into them.The funny thing is, those rollers don’t seem strictly necessary. As I learned when I tried to clean them, you can just lift the motorized lid up away from the can, and freely insert or remove as much plastic as you like, right up till it’s full enough to make a brick.Once you approve brickification by tapping a button, the lid locks for safety, then spends up to three hours compressing, heating, and cooling before it reveals a brick ready to be bagged. The melted plastic smell during the first 20 minutes is really not great. “Oh god, why does it smell like that?” my wife complained, banishing the machine to the garage thereafter. I had to open the window, too.Then, you drop that brick into one of Clear Drop’s prepaid mailers, and ship it off to… be recycled? That’s what I’ll let senior science reporter Justine Calma explain next.A closer look at one of Sean’s bricks.Is this actually helping anyone?by Justine CalmaRecycling, unfortunately, is far from a panacea for the tons of plastic waste accumulating in oceans and landfills. The global recycling rate is only about 9 percent. Even plastic beverage bottles — one of the easiest types of plastic waste to actually recycle because of the material’s chemical composition — are often “downcycled,” used to make fibers for fleece and carpet rather than turned into new bottles. It’s not a circular process, making a new bottle from an old one. The quality of the material degrades each time you rehash it, limiting most plastics to only being recycled once or twice, according to the United Nations Development Programme. And products made with recycled plastic generally still have to be reinforced with new plastics.That’s all led to the argument that portraying recycling as a cure-all for plastic pollution actually supports the production of more single-use plastics and ultimately more waste. Environmental advocates often call plastic recycling a “myth” propelled by the fossil fuel industry. Plastics are made from oil and gas, after all. California filed suit against ExxonMobil in 2024, alleging the company has “deceived Californians for almost half a century by promising that recycling could and would solve the ever-growing plastic waste crisis.”Cost is another barrier for recycling, since it’s often cheaper to make products with virgin plastics than recycled materials. Soft plastics like those used in packaging and that Clear Drop aims to collect are even trickier to reuse, since the packaging usually include a mashup of different types of plastics. There’s even less economic incentive to recycle this low-value material, which is why most municipal recycling programs and private companies won’t accept soft plastics.Clear Drop proposes to solve that problem with its compactor. The idea is that compressing soft plastic into a solid block makes it an easier and more valuable material to recycle. The company claims that its service can help customers avoid dumping 3 pounds of soft plastic into the trash over the first month.A prepaid mailer baggie. The mailing label is on the other side.But what happens when you mail out that block? For now, Clear Drop is only disclosing its partnership with Indiana-based Frankfort Plastics, where it sent