Best Ways to Reuse Plastic?

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ambiente

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When manufacturing is gone and we are left on our own, what are the best ways to use and reuse the remaining plastic we have?
 
ambiente said:
When manufacturing is gone and we are left on our own, what are the best ways to use and reuse the remaining plastic we have?
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There are lots of videos about reusing certain plastics. Slicing up soda bottles into thin strips for braiding, etc., was big for a while. HDEP (#2) plastics can be chopped up and melted back together using household heat sources like ovens and electric griddles. Then it can be carved, cut and polished. People make all kinds of stuff out of it like knife handles and whatnot.
 
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I'm not going to talk specifics to keep this brief. Recycling used plastics into new products is a pain and not usually worth the effort/risk. However if you're serious about it then you'll want to look into a vertical injection molder, and a plastic pelletizer. Essentially you're going to be breaking down the plastic you have, melting it, and casting it in molds to make "new" items that you want/need. As far as for molds and such you'll either need to make them yourself or buy them from someone else.
 
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I have seen a small machine that cuts plastic bottles into strips and uses that strip to extrudes it into 3d printing material.
 
I mean if you really want to you can keep plastic in a sealed vessel with a port for an outlet that you can control the flow of. You can then burn the plastic in there, in the absence of oxygen, to produce all kinds of hydrocarbons via pyrolysis. With wood this produces wood gas and charcoal, for your plastic it'll produce a variety of nasty, hydrocarbons that wouldn't be out of place in natural oil and gas deposits.

There was some nigger before trying to do this as some kind of """green""" alternative for plastic recycling. The products this all produces are very toxic and plastic manufacturers will include all kinds of nasty shit in their plastics, like heavy metals. None of what you produce via this method should be used in any way for anything you might ingest, not without really being knowledgeable and capable of processing it all.

The only real reason to do this may be to try and get some kind of janky ammonia production going by stripping the hydrogen off of the hydrocarbons and doing the Haber-Bosch process. However Haber-Bosch is not something you'd do on small scales, nor is it really something you should mess with without knowing what you're doing as it involves high temperatures, high pressures and explosive gases. A better, but less efficient means to get nitrogen for fertilizer would be with a Birkeland-Eyde reactor. A small spark gap will produce toxic nitrogen dioxide and other nitrogen/oxygen gases and you pass that through water to produce nitric acid as the end product and that nitric acid can be used in small quantities as a nitrogen source for fertilizer.

tl;dr: You can get poisonous slop from burning plastic the right way, but it's probably not worth it. But burning plastic for heat is unironically probably a better way to deal with it. Just don't ingest the fumes.
 
Aside from directly reusing it (just refill the bottle 5head) it was a short lived meme material to take mixed shredded/pelletized plastic warm it to just barely melting, and churn it together to press into bricks. Those bricks were mostly intended for construction but could conceivably be made into any convex form or rolled into sheets or whatever.

You can't usually just melt and recast mixed plastic because the different types have too different of properties and some of them just don't melt or join nicely.

Others have already mentioned cutting up the objects and using them ad-hoc -- cutting unneeded bottles into strips and weaving them into baskets and other such arts n' crafts. Plastic can also be "welded" for repair reasonably easily so instead of smashing apart your old TV's bezel you can just take a soldering iron and a zap strap to fill in where it cracked.
 
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Autistic AND Racist said:
NatureJab. He seems to be making progress. He's been making "plastoline" and "plastidiesel" and successfully using them in trucks.
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Ah great. Hopefully he found out what plastics he's using are adulterated with heavy metals or how to process what he makes to keep it clean. Just to quote from this study:
Historically, many additives and catalysts used in plastics were based on compounds of toxic metals (and metalloids), like arsenic, cadmium, chromium(VI), and lead.
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Further down in that study too there are tables showing what kinds of heavy metal compounds were used in plastics from Europe. It also covers why some of these compounds were added, like in some circumstances for their antimicrobial and antifungal properties; literal poisons for preservation. I kind of want to go over his videos now. I'm a little optimistic that he's done enough research to process his fuel so he's not just making a far worse alternative of leaded gasoline, but I'm cynical.

Do you know if he's ever done any GC-MS(or similar testing) on the stuff he's made to know what all is in it?

Edit: Did some digging through his content and found a video of a guy he reached out to doing GC-MS on some samples. The guy who did the analysis rose some safety concerns. Unsurprisingly the product he's making, without any checking for heavy metals, is very toxic and nasty. Toluene in particular is something that is really nasty in gasoline and is often kept at a very low percentage, something like 1% just off of the top of my head. He also has lots of styrene(the individual component that makes up polystyrene and styrofoam(foamed up polystyrene).

To note, I got a reminder in one of his videos about how he almost blew himself up doing a distillation before and learned to start using PPE during his projects since then, but the styrene is interesting because it can autopolymerize. To quote from wikipedia:
As a liquid or a gas, pure styrene will polymerise spontaneously to polystyrene, without the need of external initiators. This is known as autopolymerisation. At 100 °C it will autopolymerise at a rate of ~2% per hour, and more rapidly than this at higher temperatures. As the autopolymerisation reaction is exothermic it can be self-accelerating, with a real risk of a thermal runaway, potentially leading to an explosion.
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The last video I watched of his talking about his distillation had a large chunk of what he called wax in his distillation line. I wouldn't be surprised if it was polystyrene and he discussed how he sometimes gets massive, pressurized spurts of fluid -- almost like, I'unno, something is solidifying in his pipes to restrict the flow?

This nog is gonna blow up his distiller again, I'm calling it now. I also wouldn't be surprised if his "plastoline" would also plasticize in parts of your engine if you tried to run it with the stuff for long enough.

Here's the video doing the GC-MS on some of his products:
The analysis starts at 3:00 in.
 
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Autistic AND Racist said:
I don't know about that, but he did make a post earlier today about getting his plastidiesel tested and it passing certification. The fourth picture lists the testing methods used.
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wew, managed to reply right when I did my edit. I imagine his diesel would be safer since diesel has less volatiles. I still really want to see how much heavy metal can be leached out.
 
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