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 (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.

The device sensors indicate when it's full, then compact up to 3 pounds of material and fuse it into a block about the size of a shoebox. The block is sent to a designated recycling facility that grinds 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 practical for the average consumer.

The $2,000 Plastic Problem: 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.