DIY plastic recyclers: open-source machines for shredding plastic [audio] | Hacker News Reader

DIY plastic recyclers: open-source machines for shredding plastic [audio]

bbc.co.uk

"There's an obvious solution to the plastic problem...recycle more plastic."

No. The obvious solution is to use less plastic. There is low hanging fruit such as single-use items that can be made from other materials. Most plastics aren't recyclable.

Also even if you have two recyclable plastics, if you mix them together they can become un-recyclable.

Yes, this was literally the mantra drilled into us...

"reduce, reuse, recycle".

in that order

Future generations will look at most of the plastic we create the way we look at asbestos or second-hand smoke. Yes, there's some benefit but not worth the cost. They will recoil at how long we took to wean ourselves from the addiction, especially since their bloodstreams will contain more plastic than ours.

If we make it.

They will use abundant cheap energy to clean the environment, recycling plastic at a chemical level.

What about this project: https://m.facebook.com/WeArePLASTICPeople/

They collect all kind of plastic, melt it together and make furniture out of it.

I almost feel like we're slowly reverting back to the "old ways". If people really want something disposable, they need to look at what used to be practiced in places like Asia and Africa - for instance using banana leaves as plates (https://www.wikihow.com/Eat-Food-on-a-Banana-Leaf) or clay cups for beverages (https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2016/10/26/kolkatas-age-ol...). Or, they should not seek the disposable and use more durable items. But that may require a bit of a culture shift - for instance, maybe grocery stores should let you bring your own containers to fill up with things like oil, grains, milk, etc. This will run into our overly strict health codes and societal risk aversion, but we need to perhaps consider that there is less risk through that lifestyle than with filling oceans with plastic.

Moving away from packaging things that don't need packing would be a good start. One of the grocery stores I shop at moved a lot of the smaller bulk produce items into shrink wrapped packages in poly-styrene trays. Consumers can also stop buying pre-peeled fruit and vegetables (corn on the cob, oranges, melon, etc).

We can use less of it, make it easier to separate and then recycle :)

Here in Germany we start seeing containers for e.g. yoghurt, margarine, ... that are made out of thin, un-colored plastic and then reinforced by a paper wrap with the print for the product info and design. This paper wrap is only glued on at a few points. It also has a perforated section and a label saying to please pull there to separate paper from plastic. You can then proceed to put paper and plastic into different recycling bins (waste separation is very widespread here. You're basically being a dick if you don't do it).

Here is a picture: https://www.online-lebensmittel-lieferservice.de/wp-content/...

Plastic is a material that can sit in a landfill for 500 years, it should only be used where you need a _long_ term application that also requires a weight/shape/durability that is not easily manufacturered with other materials.

A yogurt container will have a typical 15 to 30 days shelf life, this is not a good use of plastic, it also interacts with an acidic medium (Which absolutely breaks down a fraction of the plastic structure). It really should always be made of glass, the only reason it isn't so is purely cost driven.

Coca-Cola, Nestle, Pepsico, Procter&Gamble, Danone, Mars have all pretty much externalized the huge environmental cost of plastic and reduced their operational costs at ours and our environments expense.

We are damaging ourselves and our waterways for the sake of an illusionary convenience and the profit margins of a few giants.

Glass recycling is also energy intensive but it doesn't even have be recycled, people need to stop being disgusted and go the same way as beer bottles. Glass can be high power washed or autoclaved and reused by the manufacturer. Glass transportation costs also become marginal once we transition to EV logistics delivery in the next 15/20 years.

"In 2019 the Precious Plastic Bazar processed more than €200,000 in sales." That's not serious plastic recycling.

This is serious plastic recycling.[1] 3 big plants in the US. California, Texas, and Pennsylvania. Each plant is about the size of a WalMart SuperCenter. Plastic bottles go in, and food-grade plastic pellets ready for use in making new bottles come out. Each plant can do a few billion bottles per year.

This is not a job for local, woke, participatory do it yourself. This is a job for heavy machinery. That machinery exists. San Francisco and Milpitas have the biggest recycling plants in the SF Bay Area.

[1] http://www.carbonliterecycling.com/

The most terrifying thing Youtube has put into my suggestions is videos of people 'making their own diesel' by melting down plastic. I can't begin to imagine what sort of PAHs those people are inhaling during the making and especially the burning process.

Perhaps the plants don't actually have to be the size of a Walmart, but the engineering is still pretty big. I wouldn't mind seeing smaller regional centers using mature tools.

I love DIY, but man, that is not a good idea. Right there with “make your own amalgam fillings” and “3 weird hacks for paint stripper”.

YouTube has some good content, but we all need to try on common sense, too.

Yes. It's thinking similar to the backyard steel mills of Mao's "Great Leap Forward". 600,000 backyard steel mills for 11 million tons of steel per year.[1] Slightly more than the single U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Indiana.

Some things scale really well. Recycling is one of them.

[1] https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/modern-world-history-1...

To me the benefit of a project like this is that people realize that recycling doesn’t stop when they throw something in a blue bin. Hopefully people see just how impractical plastic recycling is and it motivates voters and policy makers to stop accepting recycling efforts as an acceptable remedy to environmental problems

Yes there is a plastics waste problem, but the real problem is that it cannot be infinitely recycled in the current process that this is talking about.

Additionally at 03:25 The problem is hit on the head in another way, you still have to sort and clean the plastic before these machines can start.

A large part of all this is about raising awareness, not so much about actually solving the plastics problem through recycling. More people having hands-on experience with the realities of recycling is a good thing.

Indeed, I commend this project for raising awareness but there can only be so much awareness about a problem without a solution currently.

The problem is single use plastic, and there is a solution: use less of it.

Raising awareness of the difficulty in recycling plastic will help reduce the demand for it. Or, who knows, maybe we'll see an even better solution emerge from a makerspace working with Precious Plastics.

> sort and clean the plastic before

I always wondered if there was a way to use QR codes, if they would still be scannable after crushing

After you convince suppliers not to bond materials together that need to be separated.

Lots of info on Precious Plastic at their site[1]. The machines are just a little too spendy / complex for individuals, but it seems like lots of hackerspaces could go there.

1: https://preciousplastic.com/

You don't actually need the machines for some tasks. Sometimes an oven and a mold are enough to get a blank for shaping. Eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DILMMwH04a8

That's cool to see (though they have a pretty well-equipped workshop), but clearly the basic principle of shredding up HDPE and baking it to melt should work for almost anyone.

The next video after that one plays shows someone melting HDPE in a tin can. I'm betting that person doesn't know about the plastic lining on the can.

We should only sell plastic items in states that can truly recycle them. If you sell your stuff in a type 5 container but the state only can handle type 1. Then GTFO.

The cost of recycling (soup to nuts, collection, cleaning, sorting) should be built into the costs of using this stuff.
Plastic is only used in a really wasteful/damaging way because the costs are externalized, making it the cheapest option.
If manufacturers had to pay the real cost, they would quickly start packaging their products in alternative manners because they are cost effective.

Cleanup should probably also be included

My impression was that plastic recycling was cost-prohibitive, not physically impossible; and that pretty much all plastic recycling was a greenwashing campaign.

If you can't make recycled plastic cheaper than virgin, then nobody will actually use it, or at best you can make it a compliance item like EVs used to be. The industry will not pick up it's plastic trash unless you make them do it, or make it worth their while to do it.

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