Clear Drop Soft Plastic Compactor Review: Eco Experiment

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.