Plastic sleds to works of art: How Breck Create is looking to inspire better plastic usage in Colorado

Breck Create's Precious Plastics studio in Breckenridge hit a milestone this winter, diverting 10,000 pounds of plastic from the landfill since launching in Colorado's high country in 2021. The program has focused on turning waste into artwork while raising awareness about how much plastic the community throws away.

Items like inexpensive sleds sold at local stores tend to be the focus. When they shatter on the sledding hills in town, the plastic shards don't always get recycled, especially considering how hard it is to use that hard plastic again. Instead, Breckenridge officials and Breck Create staff collect broken sleds and other rigid plastics and bring them into the studio.

 Sustainability Manager Jessica Burley said it's a bit of a process, but the results are impressive.

"They disassemble the plastic into pellets and create new art," she said.

Rigid plastics fall into a category that standard recycling programs struggle to process, including items like buckets or hoses. Burley said diverting those materials matters because landfill space is limited, and taxpayers ultimately carry the cost once a landfill closes, so to divert things people can reuse is to save space and help the landfill stay maintained long term.

Inside the Arts District campus workspace, plastic donations are sorted, shredded and melted down using specialized equipment before being molded into new objects or artwork. The space operates as a community "mix workspace" where residents and visitors learn to transform waste into usable items through classes, workshops and open studio time. The initiative is not new; it's a partnership with the global Precious Plastic network, which aims to reduce plastic waste through local recycling systems built around people, tools and shared knowledge rather than large scale industrial solutions.

A lot of repurposed material appears in exhibits like "Second Life," where artist Jodi Stewart showcased pieces built from reclaimed sled fragments.

"Artists and designers are just fantastic at figuring out how to make magic out of plastic," Breck Create program director Jill Desmond said. "Plastic is here, (so) what can you do with it? I think that's part of having people look at plastic in another way. So it's reframing the narrative."

She emphasized the project was not trying to solve the global plastics crisis outright, but to shift how people thought about waste.

Organizers said community participation remained central to the program. Residents could volunteer, attend collection events, or bring in certain types of cleaned plastics to be reused. Even as discarded and exploded plastic sleds continue to pile up around town, leaders said the milestone shows small local efforts could make a difference by keeping waste in circulation.