Open-Source Recycling | Hacker News Reader

Open-Source Recycling

preciousplastic.com

174 pointspelim40 comments

While i nether have the room nor the time to do this, i love the idea. I also love the "Why" section of the website, so simply yet so mighty.

I'm hoping to find some workshop that would share the tools and space (for a fee), but I have no idea where to look.

Making stuff out of garbage would make me feel like Tony Stark.

I could see hacker spaces doing this, there is almost always room and a budget for new machines.

I wonder if this project is based off the earlier Recyclebot? That was something I'd wanted to build for a long time.

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:12948

http://reprap.org/wiki/Recyclebot

http://www.appropedia.org/Recyclebot

Precious Plastic certainly looks further along though - and their instructions look to be higher quality, too.

Always wanted to do this, but I was afraid reprocessing plastics would release toxic fumes or hard to detect dangers for the average guy. I can't stand throwing things anymore.

I'm obsessed with not throwing away things and really appreciate a cool project like this. But nonetheless, I would like to emphasize that recycling is no substitute for not producing and not consuming plastic, which is by far the best way to fight what is depicted in the Why? section!

You're into the San Francisco glass jars + tissue bag trend ?

The old adage back in school was "reduce, reuse, recycle" and the order is important.

Reduce your consumption as much as you possibly can. Then reuse everything over and over: rinse out the container and find another use.

Recycling is the last resort.

A positive thing for sure. But the hardest part is not the processing, it`s the sorting of different types of plastic and the washing phase if required.

How advanced are the sorting facilities? I assume they must use some image recognition and robotics already. Do they use deep learning yet?

You can use spectrometers to identify different types of plastic, e.g.

http://www.thermoscientific.com/content/tfs/en/product/micro...

Deep learning isn't required.

The main challenge is in sorting. I'm not sure how you could do this efficiently with machines that are as affordable as the Precious Plastic designs.

Sorting all the plastic waste of a major city is very hard.

Sorting your own or picking stuff out of a skip to gather enough to make a lampshade or a few coat hangers is probably more doable.

Sure, it works fine if you're selective about the plastics you use, especially if you avoid using objects that were made using a mixture of different plastics.

Honest question, what's likely to happen if you mix plastics? I understand how if melting points are different you might get odd results, and I'm guessing maybe very different materials won't bond at all leading to cracks in the final product. But if you doing something like they show in these videos, heating it to <200 degrees and just pressing the result into sheets or blocks that can be cut with hand tools, or doing very simple injection molding, can't you get away with a lot that might not be acceptable in an automated, professional setting?

Note that I'm thinking entirely in terms of what I might do myself in my workshop, not what'd scale to a city-wide or country-wide recycling system.

> "Honest question, what's likely to happen if you mix plastics?"

It's a good question, and the answer I'll give is that I'm not 100% sure. These links may be of interest:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/02/science/polymers-why-some-...

http://www.lotfi.net/recycle/plastic.html

If you find any other clear information about this subject I'd be interested in learning more.

Well, I know that some thermoplastics can be mixed with good results. I've a roll of polycarbonate-ABS in my printer right now. Normally polycarbonate prints at 310C, and this blend prints at 295C.

Ive seen other blends as well, with intermediate temps between the 2 initial plastics. Now, I only have experience with PLA, ABS, Nylon, PVA, Polycarb-ABS, and HIPS. A lot of this is still unexplored as it took industrial quantities to do anything.

WHat these machines will allow is experimentation on small batches and how plastics work and don't work. And that's awesome.

But how many hangers do you really need? I am sure we consume order of magnitude more single use containers than long term products.

I strongly suspect that the overwhelming majority of the world's recycling plants use cheap human labour, especially for tasks such as sorting.

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/witness/2015/05/unwasted...

   Do they use deep learning yet?

"yet" ? Deep learning is no panacea - it's not clear why this would even be on a top 5 list of approaches to try on a putative ML part of the process. There seems to be a lot of confusion on this, generally.

Most likely they just use cheap labor for sorting

I'd think once you have built sensors that can digitize the whatever properties of the plastic that are relevant to sorting them, actually recognizing the different types of plastics would be rather simple.

Ars Technica has a few great articles about recycling: http://arstechnica.com/search/?ie=UTF-8&q=recycling

Including one that goes into depth about sorting: http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/12/recycling-matching-hi...

they address the sorting difficulties

they have sorting suggestions based on individual plastics' density

http://preciousplastic.com/videos/plastics/

in this first video they demo the density example by first suspending in water, then adding salt to increase the water's density for a more complete seperation

Right, and that is also why I am very interested in AI that can do sorting of this kind. There are probably several component tech:

- Vision and/or tactile pattern recognition (deep neural nets). Maybe chemical sensors

- Robotic gripping and sorting. This one will be harder. Amazon and other logistics companies are keen on solving this one.

Maybe it is super naive approach, but what about sorting by the barcode of the product. A database could be created with the product barcode, parts, and plastic type for each part. Of course there could be still some parts with unknown origin that should be sorted by other methods but this could be a good improvement.

Someone who knows more should prove me wrong, but...

Intuitively shouldn't a dedicated plant's machinery have much higher efficiency? Coupling that with the biggest problems of recycling being the combined energy costs of transportation and processing, this seems to not solve anything?

It kind of solves only one leg of the transportation, but the final recycled plastic will still need to be transported. That's again assuming costs of transportation are linear with respect to number of sources (but I don't think that's true...). And assuming same thing about processing energy efficiency, this does worse with the processing energy part.

I think we'll find something more interesting if:

- The outputs of this recycling tech can be fed into personal fabrication tech (3D printers, etc.)

- Power generation is decentralized (solar, etc.)

It's part of a set of tech that would allow for the localization of manufacturing, closing the whole lifecycle locally. This in turn brings things back to the community. It's not always about total energy efficiency.

> The outputs of this recycling tech can be fed into personal fabrication tech (3D printers, etc.)

I can:

http://preciousplastic.com/videos/build/extrusion/

Well, those are not mutually exclusive.

Building a plastic recycling plant is out of reach for most of the people almost everywhere and requires industry while building those machines though requiring tools and skills is totally doable in a local workshop.

The precious plastic project allows a handful of individuals to a local operation. A village can be equipped with those machines and beyond picking the local plastic waste and reusing it, it also offers the possibility to not throw the waste away.

Here we have recycling plants, but it seems no one actually knows how they're operated, what they actually recycle from what is burned or buried and there are no obvious resulting products. What we do know is that they are expensive, financed by taxes and there are lots of constraints.

I'd rather have a place run by locals where I can get some new objects and material for a 3d printer.

Yes, but it's not all about processing efficiency. I'm sure lack of availability is mentioned, especially where there isn't money or population density

In the states, we could use it in a different way; to encourage community. If nobody recycles their goods, industrial processes can't help. Watching these machines and immediately building a new thing out of them really drives home the usefulness of recycling. It's 'cool' to watch and fun to do.

I grew up in Houston, Texas; some people recycled sometimes, but most people I knew (in affluent areas, so plenty of waste and education) just didn't care. My college apartment complex didn't have recycling at all despite a center within 10 minutes.

Our fathers mostly worked in oil / fossil fuels, where environmentalists block critical infrastructure for both good and inane reasons. (One inane example, a small town refused to allow an increase in the throughput of a natural gas pipe extending along a river; this put it at higher risk of explosion). People who recycle are the enemy; they are the guys preventing them from doing their jobs.

I want to build one of these with my dad and set it up so that the neighbors and their kids can come by, watch the plastic churn and have a new doodad to bring home. He would love it, they would love it (minus some terrified parents) and it would be a pretty great thing all around.

My wife was wondering whether this can be considered 100% healthy: don't you need plastic to reach a very high temperature to model it that way? Doesn't it start releasing whatever thing that might be carcinogenic or such?

I was going to ask the same thing, this is worse than throwing in dump where it will decompose and hundreds of years.

Thermoplastics will melt before they start to chemically decompose. Whatever residue is in the plastic might be liberated by the heat (those residues will also migrate out at room temperature, so we tend to be somewhat careful about what residue ends up in products).

Thermoset plastics will not melt and will release all sorts of magnificent things when heated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoplastic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermosetting_polymer

http://preciousplastic.com/videos/plastics/

they have a section discussing different kinds of plastics, and simplifies the information to the notion that if the plastic lacks a recycling symbol then it is in the category of 'unrecyclable'

some of the harder plastics used in 3D printing also have a very particular smell. it sort of hints to me "perhaps not be in the same room when it's operating" (getting a whiff versus standing there breathing it for an hour), and ventilate after.

unless you're worried about getting it out in the air at all, also outside. in which case I'd start with avoiding campfires, (certain types of) barbecues and petitioning your neighbours to stop using their fireplaces, good luck :p

and like others said, it's not a very high temperature.

about that "thing that mgiht be carcinogenic or such", do you mean phtalates? i might have spelled that wrong, the plastic-softener compound. it's not present in equal amounts in all types of plastic, definitely not those intended for food-containers. if it's present in higher amounts you can easily smell it, it's that particular smell that is on that soft, rubbery, "soft-grip" plastic, especially when it's new.

btw not even living itself is ever "100% healthy" :) it's always a trade-off, and in this case, it seems pretty good, trade-off is for the planet and the children :-)

From http://preciousplastic.com/machines/

> You can make the molds completely yourself using CNC to mill the lathe or simply welding them.

.... What? "mill the lathe"? I think they accidentally a word in there.

>These lines can be used to make new raw material (3d printing filament), granulate, spinned around a mold or up to you to find new creative ways.

> Well suited to make large and more solid objects, the oven itself is also a great machine for prototyping and making plastic test.

> Since it works with molds you can easily replicate and set up a production.

This website desperately needs copy-editing.

----

Also, I'm completely tired of people coming into an existing engineering discipline and deciding to come up with a whole bunch of terms for existing processes. It's not "a injection", it's *an injection molding machine. All the new terminology does is make things extra confusing.

The people behind the project are Dutch, German, Mexican [0] and none of them -from what I could see- would normally speak English as their first language.

Why don't you send an email to point out the mistakes in their text? [1]

They might even appreciate it :)

[0] - http://preciousplastic.com/thanks/

[1] - http://preciousplastic.com/contact/

Not everyone has the skills, nor the tools to do this. I love the idea, and wish someone would make the machines (or the entire kits to assemble at home). I would buy them!

As said in the intro video, ask the local handyman.

This is not out of reach, they managed to build those in Africa with whatever was available.

I've been looking for something like this for a while. Was already thinking on developing mynown machines but this just saved me lots of resources. Great project!

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