Once the plastic was intercepted in the Rio Las Vacas, our partner Biosfera GT set up a separate sorting process to set aside the best-quality PET. This was then passed to Compuestos y Derivados for processing into flakes: the start of the process of converting this plastic from waste into valuable and usable material.
The plastic flakes were then shipped to the Netherlands, where Morssinkhof continued processing the material to create granulate – the key ingredient for an LP. Once processed, the material was passed to manufacturer Sonopress to put the pieces together and make the record.
THE SOUND OF SILENCE
The challenges didn’t end there. A quality-sounding LP cannot be created using only our river plastic: it must be blended with other recycled plastic to deliver the high standards we seek in order to ensure our plastic never returns to the marine environment.
The toughest challenge was finding the right blend between our river plastic and the smaller proportion of other recycled plastic. The key question was: what is the maximum percentage of river plastic we can use in the LP while still ensuring perfect sound quality?
After long periods of testing and collaboration, our partners identified the sweet spot: each limited edition LP will consist of 70% PET river plastic, all removed from the Rio Las Vacas and passed through a traceable and sustainable supply chain. This is currently the maximum percentage we can use while maintaining quality. The smaller proportion of the plastic in these LPs is recycled waste plastic PET bottles from other sources.
