Open-Source Recycling

Open-Source Recycling(preciousplastic.com)

174 points by pelim 10 years ago | 40 comments

herbst 10 years ago |

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.

rootlocus 10 years ago | |

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.

herbst 10 years ago | | |

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

smellf 10 years ago |

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.

agumonkey 10 years ago |

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.

albertojacini 10 years ago | |

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!

colinbartlett 10 years ago | | |

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.

agumonkey 10 years ago | | |

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

pingec 10 years ago |

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.

fgblanch 10 years ago | |

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.

hosh 10 years ago | |

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.

justifier 10 years ago | |

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

dzhiurgis 10 years ago | |

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

ska 10 years ago | | |

   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

ZenoArrow 10 years ago | | |

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.

austinjp 10 years ago | | |

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...

coldpie 10 years ago | | |

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...

aznpwnzor 10 years ago |

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.

winterismute 10 years ago |

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?

maxerickson 10 years ago | |

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

justifier 10 years ago | |

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'

tripzilch 10 years ago | |

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 :-)

meapix 10 years ago | |

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

fake-name 10 years ago |

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.

wila 10 years ago | |

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/

Fastidious 10 years ago |

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!

bigbugbag 10 years ago | |

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.

asimuvPR 10 years ago |

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!