Proctor’s ‘Atlas Games’ Putting Plastic Waste To The Challenge

PROCTOR, Minn. — Atlas Games out of Proctor has been creating and publishing board and card games since the 90s. And within the past couple of years, the company has evolved to make games out of plastic waste.

“You don’t realize it, that a lot of plastic you have that you think you are recycling properly, it just goes through the system and filters through and ends up in landfills,” said Shane Demos, Replay Workshop Coordinator. “So if we can do something to prevent it from doing that why wouldn’t we.”

Workshop Coordinator Shane Demos and Atlas Games President John Nephew are proud of their accomplishments so far. One of the company’s most popular games is now waste-free.

“We now on the market have the deluxe plastic mountain from Dice Miner, made out of 100% recycled plastic and is primarily 90 percent or so, is actually pill bottles and vitamin bottles from here in Duluth that had been going to landfills from local pharmacies,” said John Nephew, Atlas Games President.

There’s a process to the so-called recycling game. Atlas has a Replay Workshop that Nephew says is a “laboratory for experiment.”

“The first step of the process is collecting, we’ll take it back here and collect it, we’ll clean it, sort it by what kind of plastic it is, and then shred it down, and then once it’s been shredded down we either, we’ll do something with it or we have sold it to different people around the country and basically around the world that can make products with it,” said Demos.

Nephew says growing waste at landfills is the main motivator for making products out of recycled material; pill bottles, plastic bins and political yard signs are some of his targets.

“What we have been doing is collecting those lawn signs and shredding them up. You can see in this jar here an example of shredded lawn sign material. And we have been successful in using that to make new plastic objects,” said Nephew.

And those objects can become uniquely colorful with patterns.

“This is actually a look that is extremely hard or impossible to obtain with industrial machinery because when you’re using a big industrial machine, the screw that heats and presses the plastic tends to mix it up and make it very consistent in its appearance,” said Nephew.

Meanwhile, as the team members at Atlas continue to prefect their recycling craft, they’re already in the final stages of a new product.

“One of the things that we have here that is going to be coming to the market this year, we ran a kicked starter last fall on what we call inFUNity tiles,” said Nephew.

Nephew calls the tiles a mathematical discovery, designed to cover an infinite surface without repeating the same pattern. And the tiles, you guessed it—are made out of 100% recycled material.

Many Atlas Games products can be found in local toy stores such as Level-Up Superior and Legacy Toys in the Miller Hill Mall.