In November 2023, Plymouth Social Enterprise Network (PSEN)  Celebrated its 10 year anniversary as a Social Enterprise Network in the Social Enterprise Capital of the UK. Precious Plastics Plymouth was asked if they could create their lanyards and badge pins for this event. 

This meant we had to test out a new production method!

We wanted to create a laminate sheet of recycled plastic with 2 different colour layered plastics. This way we could laser etch text into the top layer so that the second layer became visible. This meant you could read etch-in readable text into the plastic

We used recycled PLA,  3D printing filament donated to us by the University of Arts, Plymouth. We chose PLA as it etches very nicely with crisp edges in the laser cutter

This was a method that we hadn’t tried before on this scale. We had to press plastics in our small T-shirt  press, let them cool down under pressure to prevent them from warping. Once cooled down we returned the sheets to the press to load the second layer of different coloured plastic on there

For the pin badges we used a mixture of orange and green.For the lanyards we used a mixture of orange and white to represent PSEN’s logo.

We’re happy with the results and so was PSEN.

We hope to work together again with them in the future. We would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate them with their 10 year anniversary!