What does it take to recycle plastic at home?

[Xist]

I referred to the hemp paste.

By the way, I measured one of the 2.5-gallon buckets the Safeway bakery gave me for free, and with lid it weighs 495g, so in theory I could melt one and make something weighing over one pound, but even if I modified a panini press to work like a press for objects up to 1' tall, how long would it take to melt a bucket?

I don't know, but it still sounds like less work than melting hundreds of milk caps!

I could use a jig saw over a work bench, cut off the top and bottom, and cut the sides in half, then just leave them and the dust I brush off my work bench until they are nice and melty.

They made plastic boards resembling 2x4s as well as more like 2x2s from which they made a pallet and a park bench, but this doesn't seem nearly as strong as pine, which isn't a great standard.

They made a big mold--they use lots of plywood for molds, but I guess that is okay if they use them many times.

They put a coat of varnish on it and they made a press, but only looks about 18" square, although in theory they could make a version specifically for 2x4s, but that much plastic, in that orientation, required excessive handling, and this entire process (including the research), requires excessive time and energy. Pallet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZKtfT6y0v8

Small coffee table:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJnVAQqkdcQ

Park bench:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGc-Z7TtiVg

Mud kitchen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k3g4W7w4CQ

Cutting board:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx2B55YG4SY

In the first video I shared they made a tablesaw push stick. If one made two thinner ones and added 2 small hinges they could make a book stand.

How well could you 3d-print hinges?

Maybe large plastic hinges would work as well as small metal ones.

Or you could 3d-print the entire thing.

I would maybe pay $200 for a bench--if I wanted a bench--and $100 for that small table, so I don't see anything that would be worth my time even if my neighbors brought over their clean used plastics.

I have seen greenhouses built from empty plastic bottles, but those are supposed to off-gas in the sun, which sounds terrible.

Those brothers keep saying their plastic is UV-stable, so I really want to know more about that.

Proto Plastics say that Acrylic, Polycarbonate, HDPE, Polyetherimide, and Polyphenylene Sulfide are UV-resistant.

This guy 3d-printed a mini greenhouse:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkotuaGKC8M

freebeard, this is your time to shine! You were born for this moment! Your entire life you have trained for this!

How do I 3d-print a geodesic greenhouse?

[freebeard]

I need a nap. Let's see what I have in an album:

How well could you 3d-print hinges?

It's called print-in-place.

www.thingiverse.com/search?q=print-in-place+hinge&page=1&type=things&sort=relevant

Me? Personally? My bed isn't level.

[Xist]

Step 1: 3d-print a conex.
Step 2: Repeat.
Step 3: 3d-print a pole.
Step 4: ????
Step 5: Profit?!

I am not seeing any profit!

However, do you know what is one plastic-based product with a low density is?

Clothing.

Only 9% of all plastic today is reused. The rest end up in landfills or worse, the ocean. So we decided to do something about it, by turning post-consumer plastic bottles into ultra soft, fashionable and eco-friendly clothing. Same quality as other apparel, just sustainable.

From plastic to clothes - step by step
1. We collect 6-8 large post-consumer PET plastic bottles (for a recycled t-shirt)

2. The bottles are clinically washed, Monica from Friends style

3. The plastic bottles are then shredded to flakes

4. Next, the plastic flakes are melted into tiny pellets

5. The pellets are extruded and spun into soft yarn

6. Lastly, the yarn is woven into modern, sustainable clothing

Now I need a nap! From Plastic Bottles to Soft Tees

Our production process releases 55% fewer carbon emissions, uses 50% less energy and 20% less water than producing virgin polyester, which is the fabric used in about 60% of all clothes today.

I never watched "Friends," but as far as I can tell, Monica never washed bottles on-screen, she was just obsessive-compulsive.

For larger projects the Australian brothers use industrial shredders, extruders, and rectangular steel tubing, which would certainly be easier, but what an initial investment!

Also, the extruder is so hot they need to wear respirators.

Personally, I would rather build an enclosure around the extruder with HEPA filters.

Anyway, tossing 7 large plastic bottles into a shredder, and extruding that into yarn, and then knitting that into cloth seems like even more work, but still, turning 7 large bottles into a $20 shirt sounds like a better ROI than anything else I have mentioned.

I don't see anyone doing this in their garage, though.

How do I summon a Plastic Rumpelstiltskin?

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by Xist

I want to recycle everything, but it just isn't feasible, and if I wanted to recycle plastic into something useful, I really think that it would make more sense to pay schoolkids $5-10 an hour to rinse and dry plastic containers for an hour or two a day.

You're getting nearer to my argument, that it doesn't make sense for millions of people to be recycling experts and clean and sort the recyclables, only to have that effort thwarted by those who don't sort or clean their recyclables.

It should all be a single container, a single truck that comes through the neighborhood (maybe yard debris still needs to be a separate container), and trained professionals with proper equipment and robots sorts through everything and cleans it.

I want to recycle everything once we figure out how to automate most everything and power those things with nearly free energy. You don't burn 100 gallons of fuel to recover 80 gallons worth of fuel equivalency. The economics always needs to make sense, otherwise it's both a waste of money and detrimental to our natural resources.

[freebeard]

I am not seeing any profit!

However,

Mock me and expect more help? I'm big enough for that.

I came back to share this: Jigsaw puzzle generator


Set jitter to zero and you should get repeatable shapes. They also do rectangles.

[Xist]

Your argument has always been that we should pay people as little as possible to sort it and we always point out that paper and cardboard get ruined that way.

Here is an NPR article about why China stopped buying our recyclables, which you clearly dismissed:

Waste expert Joe Dunlop at the Athens-Clarke County materials recovery facility near Athens, Ga., explained the problem. Conveyor belts deliver tons of trash every hour, with magnets diverting metal and paper going into bins for recycling. Some plastic is binned up, too, if it's recyclable — bottles, for example.

That doesn't work for non-ferrous metals!

And there was this brilliant tactic to increase profits: West Coast ports in the U.S. were full of empty Chinese shipping containers that had come to deliver goods to American consumers. "So it made a lot of sense to send [waste] out though the port in an empty ship that was going back anyway," Bourque says.

He pulls up a 2-foot-square piece of cardboard out of a 10-foot-pile of trash. "A cardboard box wrapped in our No. 1 contaminate, film plastic," he says. "That's just bad. What is so awful about a cardboard box that they had to go and do this to it?"

The cardboard/plastic combo originally held beverages, he says, "but have you ever had to unpackage containers? It's a pain in the butt."

How often do you see a cardboard carton, for milk, nectar, broth, etc., and their is foil and\or plastic bonded to it?

China had plenty of capacity to handle plastics and lots of cheap laborers to sort the recyclable materials from the nonrecyclable. By 2016, the U.S. was exporting almost 700,000 tons a year to China alone. Overall, China imported 7 million tons from around the world.

In fact, Bourque actually tracked some of the plastic scrap from his operation in Berkeley. In 2016, he buried a GPS transponder in one of his bales of paper and plastic waste from the Ecology Center. Waste brokers bought it. He followed the transponder's electronic signals to a town in China. Bourque then contacted local residents to document what happened to it. They reported to Bourque what they saw.

"And what we found confirms some of our worst nightmares: dumping in the local canyon of materials they couldn't recycle, plastic in the farmland incorporated into the soil of the cornfields nearby," he says.

Exports from the U.S. to Thailand jumped almost 7,000 percent in one year. Malaysia's went up several hundred percent. Those numbers dropped in 2018 after those countries cut back on imports.

They already stopped buying our recyclables?

Stiv Wilson is an environmental activist and documentary filmmaker who works with a project on waste called The Story of Stuff. He has also been working with an environmental group called Ecoton in Indonesia, another big importing country. Wilson visited a town near a recycling plant in the city of Surabaya. The plant takes paper bales mixed with plastic.

"That plastic gets separated by the paper factory," he says. "It gets dumped in the neighboring community, and then the only way to get rid of it is to openly burn it. It is also used as fuel for boiling water to make tofu in small tofu factories all around. ... Air, water and land (are) all affected by this."

These new dumping destinations aren't likely to last. Already, Vietnam and Malaysia are cutting back imports of scrap plastic because they are overwhelmed. They can't handle the huge diversion of plastic to their countries since China shut out imports.

Where Will Your Plastic Trash Go Now That China Doesn't Want It?

Don't like NPR?
"`[A] lot of the plastic China received in recent years was poor quality, and it became difficult to turn a profit.'” Fox News: Thanks to China, over 100 million metric tons of plastic waste will soon have nowhere to go

That was an extremely short article. This one is slightly longer, but neither has many details, and it took at least 5 tries to load this and spam Esc before Fox News cleared the page: Fox News: Recycling programs seen as a waste in many communities because of high costs, inefficiencies That seems to just say "Throw away everything! It is cheaper!

Unfortunately, I have spent all day on this, and haven't found any solutions.

Undoubtedly I had better ways of spending my time, but I am still waiting on at least one letter of recommendation. Each person who agreed to submit one for me simply needs to copy and paste--one previously wrote a LoR, which I copied and pasted into an e-mail.

At least one on-line program also has a deadline today, so I am going to see what time they cut us off and what other requirements they have.

[Xist]

Originally Posted by freebeard

Mock me and expect more help? I'm big enough for that.

I came back to share this: Jigsaw puzzle generator


Set jitter to zero and you should get repeatable shapes. They also do rectangles.

At what point did I mock you?

I asked you to find a more humorous response!

There have been sixteen posts before this one.

To which idea is that a response?

[freebeard]

Now my head hurts.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by Xist

Your argument has always been that we should pay people as little as possible to sort it and we always point out that paper and cardboard get ruined that way.

"[A] lot of the plastic China received in recent years was poor quality, and it became difficult to turn a profit.'”

The definition of waste is something that isn't valuable enough for someone to invest the resources to obtain it.

It's not clear to me that cardboard is anything but waste, but fortunately a "renewable" resource.

I always argue that employers should pay as little as possible to achieve the competent results they desire. Likewise, individuals should maximize the return on their labor which involves becoming highly competent. Those 2 competing interests maximize efficiency which is the same thing as maximizing value for all involved in an economic system.

[Xist]

People claim that banks should offer savings account with large returns, like 5%, to benefit people [who aren't smart enough to invest].

Right now CIT Bank is offering 4.75% and that is the single-highest rate I can find.

I have $9,000 in the bank and at some point I should really move it into a bank that provides a higher interest rate, but my offer still stands to Mom: Make the arrangements so that my brother and I inherit her house and I will help her pay off her remaining mortgage.

Right now she owes $18,000 and her rate is over 6%, but that will compound for years.

Of course, I should get around to doing things instead of waiting for her to do things, but I have so many things to do!

Like research ways to save the world when every time I conclude that we are doomed.

This indicates the average profit margin for a bank is around 4%: What Net Interest Margin Is Typical for a Bank?

The last page I read said that on-line banks usually offer much better rates than brick-and-mortar ones, which don't feel the need to compete for business.

I don't have any idea if banks could offer 5% profitably.

Many people don't care about profits, but it doesn't benefit anyone if banks go out of business.

People always make claims that the minimum wage should be $15-30 and I ask "Why not $50 an hour so someone working the minimum wage at McDonald's makes $100,000 annually?"

I am sure that some would agree with that, but since the average profit margin in the food industry is 5%, that would involve prohibitively-expensive Big Macs--or more automation.

When I posted about recycling glass there was a machine that would identify types of glass, labels, and bottle caps, and sort them using gusts of air.

Maybe we can finally recycle once we have sufficiently-advanced robotics (which resembles magic).

At some point I plan on asking ChatGPT about this, but I have been too busy with my own ideas and responding to the two of you.

I mentioned health problems from workers sorting plastic and didn't find anything with those specific articles.

I haven't specifically looked for it, but guess who can't get sick?

Robots.

They also don't give you attitude, strike, etc., although my devices never seem to work right, so maybe the android constructors in Star Wars were correct in designing pain sensors.

For the on-line program application due today:

All application materials should be submitted to CSDCAS at least 3-4 weeks prior to the application deadline. Applications are not complete without the following required documentation.

Your Personal Essay should be 2-3 pages that expresses your goals for applying to the program.

Please upload your 25 hours of observation documentation including your full name, all observation dates, your supervisor's full name and their signature with their ASHA certification number

It seems like every SLP program has a picture of a lady pointing at her mouth.

In 8 years I have never simply pointed out my mouth and I have always wondered what these pictures were supposed to represent.

"No no, you need to talk with your mouth!"


I am guessing the S she is holding has something to do with it, but usually their mouths are open.