Our Process

We partner with local businesses as drop-off points for the recyclable materials that were originally part of a purchase they made.

The material a business sells often comes back through its own door as waste: an offcut, a spent cell, an end-of-life device. Rather than build a separate collection system, we place a bin at that natural return point and close the loop where it starts.

For the customer, dropping off is as convenient as the original purchase. For the partner, it is a visible commitment to keeping material out of landfill. For us, it means a clean, predictable, pre-sorted supply.

Our plastic feedstock comes from scale-model kits: the runners and sprues left over once the parts are clipped out.

Every model kit (Gunpla and its relatives) arrives as parts held on a plastic lattice. Once a build is finished, that lattice is discarded. It is one of the cleanest waste streams available: uniform, high-grade polystyrene and ABS, moulded to a known spec, sorted by frame, and free of any food or liquid contamination.

Hobby and model stores are the ideal partner. Their customers generate a steady supply of this exact offcut, and many builders already save their runners rather than bin them. We place a collection bin in the shop; the material flows straight into our injection-molding loop.

Post-industrial resin like this is cleaner and more homogeneous than curbside plastic, so it commands a premium¹, yet no BC program takes plastics from business, and no local buyer pays for PS or ABS². That gap is our feedstock.

Lithium cells accumulate wherever devices are sold or serviced. We partner with those businesses to intercept them.

End-of-life cells are hazardous in a curbside bin but valuable in the right hands. We collect them through the businesses that handle them every day and route them into Project HEX for testing, grading, and rebuilding into modular power units.

Three partner types supply this stream:

Phone & IT repair shops: cells pulled during battery replacements and board repairs, otherwise stockpiled or discarded.
E-cigarette & vape retailers: spent disposables and modules, each holding a lithium cell usually discarded with life still in it.
Electronics retailers: large stores such as Best Buy that already run take-back programs and gather cells at volume.

BC has no vape take-back today; a producer-funded program is legislated for October 2027, with plans due December 2026; no processor is named yet, even in Quebec's live program⁴. Discarded cells also drove 448 waste-facility fires across the US and Canada in 2025⁵. Intercepting them now is both a safety measure and a head start.

A third stream turns clear PET drink bottles into 3D-printer filament, and takes the spools and failed prints a makerspace would otherwise bin.

Clear PET (#1) is the most abundant, best-sorted plastic in any waste stream, and close kin to the PETG that desktop 3D printers run. We rinse the bottles, cut each into a continuous ribbon, and draw it through a heated die into 1.75 mm filament, using the technique open-sourced by the Polyformer project.⁶

A makerspace is the ideal second source and destination. Its printers shed leftover spools and failed prints daily⁷; we collect both, refill the empty spools with reclaimed filament, and regrind the print waste. The material never leaves the building's loop.

Bottles from the branch's recycling become filament for the branch's printers; the offcuts go back to the start. Collected here, remade here, printed here.

If your business generates one of our streams, joining takes one short call and costs you nothing; we bring the bin, the branding, and the pickup.

Start with what you already throw away: model runners, a spent cell, an end-of-life device. Get in touch and we book a short call to learn what you generate, how much, and how often, then schedule collection around your hours. No contract, no fee, no equipment to buy.

We install a collection bin at your counter carrying both the Riposte mark and your own, so every customer sees your shop keeping material in a local loop. From there we service it on schedule and route the material back into the loop; you divert waste, your customers get a story, and the material gets a second life.