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Comment by monkmartinez | Hacker News Reader

US Centric view:

I would love to open a workspace. Full stop.

However, due to the price of the shredder and the tools required to transform the plastic into new forms; One needs to have a dedicated space with a lot of power. Then you need to secure a source of plastic. You would think this part would be easy, I mean that is the whole premise of this org's existence, right? You would be wrong in that assumption. There is big money in "recycling" in the US. From the collection, sorting, and distribution of recycled materials... someone already has a contract to legally "do it."

I am bummed to see them in this position. There seems to be a few hotspots around the world where this would really work. They aren't near me, that is for sure.

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15KW to make a single sheet of plastic. That is practically the entire capacity of a residential power feed.

And “several sheets per day”. Ouch.

If I were seeing a plastic recycling facility on How It’s Made I would expect to see a continuous feed system, with elaborate heat scavenging systems to preheat the ingredients while cooling the product.

I’m not sure how you scale such a thing down to cottage industry scale. Preheating to around 60° could be reasonably done by amateurs but this stuff goes up to at least 350° to melt plastic.

Am thinking propane tanks.

Working with those temps probably not appropriate for an office environment, but on a porch or well-ventilated garage, should economically outperform 110V pretty well.

Running the recycling operation off propane is hilarious. That sounds like an easy way to emit far more CO2 than just burning the plastic and making some new plastic out of the propane.

New Belgium distilling used to take the dregs from their beer batches and ferment them again anaerobically to produce methane they then used to fire some of their boilers.

Then those dregs got composted and used on the landscaping.

There are ways to co-generate fuel for this but I don't want to lose the larger message that PP is producing toy solutions no matter how you zhuzh them up.

Could they get over that in version 5? Probably. But more likely on 6 or 7, and more likely still for another entrepreneur to scoop them and make something real.

Interesting. I have used Precious Plastic and similar machines in educational settings and I know a few people who have set up more or less permanent workshops. There were never any problems getting materials (one's own trash, old plastic furniture and other plastic things from classified ads, have participants bring their own materials, ...).

Could you elaborate on how the machines are expensive? Did you want to buy or build them?

Would it be possible to do something on a much smaller scale? In addition to workspaces they also have community drop off points. With some concerted effort and education you could likely get a few communities to commit to such a project and bring their cleaned and sorted plastics

There might even already be a drop off point near you https://community.preciousplastic.com/map

I don’t think “full stop” means what you think it means.

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