At CES 2026, I was hustling through the Venetian Resort’s convention center, drinking the last of my soda and then tossed the empty plastic bottle into a recycling bin. I’m much more confident that it’ll avoid ending up in a landfill than other types of plastic, such as shopping bags.
But startup Clear Drop is changing that with its Soft Plastic Composter. It resembles a trash can with a slot in the middle, which can be fed flexible plastic items such as bags or gloves. When it has enough in its metal gullet, you can tap a button for the SPC to heat up all the ingested plastic and compress it into a brick about the size of a shoebox. Then, using a premade envelope, you can ship it to a facility in Indiana that processes the plastic.
The SPC isn’t cheap, retailing for about $1,400. But customers don’t need to pay the entire amount up-front — they can pay $200 initially and then $50 per month for 24 months thereafter, which includes the shipping and recycling services. Clear Drop didn’t disclose how much it would cost per month to continue the service after that, only that it would be less than $50.
While the overall cost is steep, Matt Daly, head of partnerships at Clear Drop, told me that its initial run of SPCs (which started shipping in recent months) is nearly sold out. And it’s not just for households, Daly said, as SPCs have also gone to small businesses. Pharmacies have specifically appreciated their units, which process so much spare plastic that they go through five or six bricks a day. The average household, by comparison, will produce a brick in two to three weeks.
It’s worth noting that not all soft plastics work with the SPC — elastic gloves, for instance, or elastic gloves made of vinyl can’t be recycled in the device. There is a slight learning curve in determining which types of soft plastic won’t work in the SPC, but avoiding vinyl is the most important because it melts in the heat.
Clear Drop is working on a lighter and cheaper model, recognizing that the desire to recycle and engage in sustainable living is desirable for more than those who can afford SPC’s current price. But there’s a recognition among Clear Drop’s clients that what they’re doing validates their sustainable desires.
“There is definitely a cohort of people who care and will put their money where their mouth is and do something about it,” Daly said.
In addition to the cheaper model, Clear Drop is working on innovating the processing of hard plastics, such as Tupperware or other containers made from far more rigid versions of the flexible plastic it currently uses. But when I asked whether they would make a version that processed other similar material like plastic, such as the soda bottle I threw away, Daly said no — plastic bottles are more of a solved problem that already reaches higher rates of recyclability than soft plastic. The latter, made up of grocery bags and other pliable plastics, is their focus. But they won’t say no to the future of processing other types of plastic.
Source: CNET
