Review: Clear Drop Soft Plastic Compactor (SPC)

I test a fair amount of sustainable home tech for WIRED, from smart bird feeders to indoor smart gardens, but I have never seen anything quite like Clear Drop’s Soft Plastic Compactor, or SPC.

At 2.5 feet tall and made of stainless steel with a black lid, the 61-pound SPC could easily be mistaken for a trash can. It works much like a paper shredder, but seeing it in action is almost hypnotic, ASMR-adjacent. Press the Unlock button on the top control panel, and strong rollers will suck in your plastic, like dollar bills being fed into a change machine. (These rollers can be locked for the safety of curious children or pets.) Any plastic you can crumple in your hand is fair game—from bubble wrap and Amazon mailers to shrink-wrap and freezer bags.

When the device sensors indicate it's full, the SPC will compact up to 3 pounds of material and fuse it into a block about the size of a shoebox. The block is then sent in an included mailer to a designated recycling facility, which will grind it into feedstock—raw material that can be compressed into things such as composite decking and highway safety cones.

While soft-plastics collection services exist, like Terracycle and Ridwell, there are no other devices like the SPC that preprocess waste in a user's home. However, after testing this machine for four months, I'm just not convinced it's a practical device for the average consumer.

The $2,000 Plastic Problem

Let's get the most egregious part out of the way first—the SPC requires a $799 down payment, plus a $49 monthly subscription for 24 months, which includes only one mailer each month. So that means a buyer will ultimately spend $2,000 on the unit itself and still eventually have to buy mailers, which currently run about $15 each. I had to ask Clear Drop founder Ivan Arbouzov who, exactly, he envisioned buying this.

“That’s a very fair question," he said. “Right now, the early adopters tend to be people who are already highly motivated around sustainability—households that actively separate waste and are frustrated by how difficult it is to deal with soft plastics.”

Am I that motivated? To be fair, I kept the SPC in my kitchen during testing and was surprised not only by how often I used it but also by how unobtrusive it was. It takes up about 2 square feet of space, but it doesn't make noise except when it's compacting (about 60 decibels, but this is infrequent). There are no distracting lights, and there's no app. All necessary tasks can be accomplished with four buttons (lock or unlock, reverse feed, manual feed, turn beeping on or off) and a little digital screen.

The screen shows a “percent full” calculation, but this number does not update as plastic is added, as one might expect. Instead, the determination is based on the last time the machine sensed it was time to compact its contents. You'll know it's calculating whether or not to compact when a little “CR” appears in the upper-right corner. If it compacts and senses its contents are at 100 percent, it will present the option to form a block. You can choose to form the block right then or at some point in the future.

Photograph: Kat Merck

Block formation, which involves heating the plastic just enough to get it to stick together, is a silent process that takes about half an hour, followed by a cooling period. The manual says cooling takes three hours, but I found it's closer to one hour. When the screen says it's done, you lift the lid, and the finished block rises up dramatically on a telescoping platform, like Beyoncé at a concert.

Despite the manual's assurance that the SPC has been “tested for air quality,” you will smell the block forming, and it smells … well … like something you shouldn't be breathing in. It's not strong enough to fill a room, but if you are within a few feet of the unit, you will definitely get a disconcerting whiff.

Around the Block

I actually saw the finished product before I got to test the machine. A package arrived at my house from Clear Drop's head of product, Matt Daly, containing pre-addressed poly mailers ($45 for three) and a representative 12 x 8 x 4-inch white plastic block with rounded edges, from Daly's own home. ("Clean," he assured in a note.) It looked like a shaggy igloo brick—a consumer strata of ziplocks, Amazon mailers, and produce bags. Though the flat bottom was largely opaque, I could make out the label from a bag of Thomas’ Bagel Thins.

Photograph: Kat Merck

Soft plastics are notorious for jamming sorting machines, slipping through processing lines, and wreaking havoc on the environment. They're also not accepted in most municipal curbside recycling programs.

Facilities for recycling these types of plastic exist, but getting waste to these locations clean and free of what some call “wishful recycling" items (compostable cups, plastic utensils) is such a challenge that the majority of soft plastics, even the bags recycled at the front of grocery stores, end up in the trash. The SPC is what Arbouzov calls a “pre-recycling device," designed to simplify this stream and deliver plastic that's contained, traceable, and more likely to make it through the system.

I tried to envision how the blocks would turn into patio furniture, as advertised, but didn't learn exactly how until months later, when Arbouzov sent me a video of the blocks at their final destination—a facility in Frankfort, Indiana, that specializes in processing polyethylene and polypropylene films. The blocks get shredded into crumbles resembling, at least on video, handfuls of wet newspaper, which are then compressed into composite decking, chairs, garden edging, and more.

“The full cycle from mailing a block to it entering recycling processing typically takes a few weeks," Arbouzov said, "depending on shipping time and batching schedules.” Right now, the Frankfort location is the only facility processing the blocks, but Arbouzov said he hopes this is only temporary.

“Our goal is to shift more of this processing closer to where the material is generated, so blocks can move in bulk through regional recycling infrastructure rather than through mail-based logistics," he said. "The mail-back system is essentially a bridge that allows the material to be captured today while that larger infrastructure develops.”

Recycling, Rewired

I found that my household of three was able to produce a block every couple of weeks, which quickly outpaced the provided supply of mailers. As the blocks started piling up on the floor of my office, I found myself wishing the SPC made something useful for consumers. Spoons, straws, 3D-printing filament … anything that could be used at home.

However, a 2023 Greenpeace report found that recycling plastic can actually make it even more toxic than it already is—heating it can not only cause existing chemicals to escape into the air and water supply, but even create new ones, like benzene. Would I want this in my house? Does recycled plastic actually belong in a circular economy? I asked Arbouzov what he thought.

“We’re familiar with that argument," he said. “Those are generally related to mixed or poorly controlled recycling streams, where unknown additives can accumulate across multiple cycles. That is one of the reasons traceable and controlled material streams are important. When recyclers receive consistent polyolefin-rich feedstock, they can process it under defined specifications rather than dealing with highly contaminated mixed waste.”

Photograph: Kat Merck

This made me consider the types of places known for consistent streams of plastic refuse—businesses and institutional settings like schools and hospitals. These are, in fact, some of the strongest use cases for the SPC, Arbouzov said.

Clear Drop is running a pilot collaboration with The Shaw Institute, a nonprofit scientific research organization in Maine that studies plastic pollution, toxic chemicals, and climate-related impacts on ocean and human health. As part of that collaboration, an SPC is being used in the Shaw lab as part of its internal sustainability strategy.

Other successful SPC commercial collabs, according to Arbouzov, have included the office of a Texas-based holding company with restaurant and transport operations and a bridal and tuxedo shop looking for a way to recycle its steady flow of garment bags, shrink wrap, and packaging film.

In the end, Arbouzov said, the SPC isn't so much a consumer gadget as a transitional product aimed at building better waste infrastructure. “More broadly, our goal isn’t simply to sell appliances,” he said. “It’s to build a distributed recycling infrastructure, where part of the preparation happens directly where waste is produced.”

I enjoyed my time with the SPC, and it definitely made me more aware of the sheer volume of soft plastics that pass through my house each week. However, is soft plastics recycling ultimately my problem to solve? From filtering our own water to purifying our own air and composting our own food scraps, the burden of managing waste and ensuring a healthy environment is continually shifting onto consumers, who only have so much money, time, and bandwidth. Perhaps these resources could be better spent advocating for system-level change—like limiting the manufacture of soft plastics to begin with.