3 Easy Recycled Plastic Projects | Recycling for Beginners

some of you have mentioned that you don't have access to all of the tools that we use in our videos so we figured let's make it easier this video is sponsored by skillshare did you know that only nine percent of plastic that's ever been made has actually been recycled even if you're super careful about what you put in your recycling bin there is no guarantee that that will be recycled therefore recycling plastic at home is a great way to take responsibility for your plastic waste so in this video we're going to show you our super simple method of turning waste material into brand new products using stuff you probably have around the house to do this the plastic you're going to need is hdpe which is marked with a number two inside a recycling triangle if you've seen any of our other videos you'll know our favorite source for this is milk bottle tops let's run through the tools that you're going to need first up you're going to need some way to heat the plastic our favorite thing to use is a flat plate panini press you'll need some baking paper to stop the plastic from sticking to the press a chisel or a sharp knife to clean up the rough edges some sandpaper in a range of grits a drill a coping saw some clamps and a good pair of oven gloves our favorite are silicone oven mitts as they don't stick to the melted plastic so we know what some of you might be thinking won't melting plastic release toxic fumes for some plastics yes but htp is different as long as the plastic you're melting is clean and you don't go above the burning point of 180 degrees c then nothing harmful will be released however if you are concerned about a rogue piece of dirty plaster getting into the mix or if you're doing a larger scale you may want to invest in a respirator if you do we recommend a 3m respirator with a set of abek1 filters which are designed for non-organic vapors so once you've grabbed your panini press you'll want to line it in some way to make sure it's non-stick baking paper works great however if you're doing this regularly you may want to pick up some teflon baking sheets as these last a lot longer after your press has warmed up you'll want to start loading in your plastic if you're using lids you want to make sure these are top down to avoid any air being trapped [Music] you'll notice that we like to keep our colors separate in the initial melting phase as this gives you a little bit more control over the marbling patterns you can achieve [Music] the twisting and folding throughout ensures that any air bubbles are worked out of the plastic as well as giving you that striking marble pattern [Music] the next step is where the flat plate press comes in handy as once you're happy with the color mix all you need to do is add some weight to the top and turn the press off and leave it to fully cool you then end up with a lovely flat sheet of plastic [Music] so first up we're going to show you how to make some coasters out of your new sheet material simply mark on your desired shape clamp it down and cut to the line a coping saw is about as simple as you can get but feel free to use anything you have to hand you'll then want to tidy up those rough edges a sharp knife here works well but we find a chisel gives that a little bit more control [Music] so as always the fabulous thing about working with recycle plastic is that you can save all of your offcuts for use in future projects so you could absolutely leave it there however we wanted to give ours a sand up to 400 grit just on the top surface be aware that sanding will create microplastics to combat this we use a dedicated dust extractor so we can clean up after ourselves and reuse it later next up we're going to make a pendant using the same technique as we did before we melted another slab in a different color before cutting it out and shaping it [Music] um since this is for a piece of jewelry we wanted to give it a slightly nicer finish so we started hand sanding at 120 grit and took it all the way to 600. [Music] now our favorite way to polish recycled plastic is to use one of these car polishing tools but since this is a limited tools project we're going to assume you guys don't have one of these and we're going to go find something else that might work instead any type of polish will do the job to give it a bit more of a shine so we raised our kitchen cupboard and found a few things that could work we prefer to use a polish over a wax as the wax would sit on top of the plastic making it much harder to recycle in the [Music] future [Music] just before we show you how to make our third and final product we just want to take a quick moment to talk about this video sponsor skillshare skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creative people it enables you to explore new skills deepen those existing passions and just get lost in your creativity some topics we've got on our watch list include sustainability and home recycling as well as presenting to camera and how to make engaging content one class we've been really enjoying recently is building an etsy shop that sells by parker guard since we recently launched our online shop and etsy store this class was fantastic at giving us tips on how to make us more discoverable so more people can find us and see our recycled plastic products it's curated specifically for learning meaning there's no ads and they're always launching new premium classes this helps you to stay focused and follow along wherever your creativity takes you and you get all of that for seven pound a month which is just less than ten dollars with an annual subscription also the first 1000 of our subscribers to click the link in the description will get a free trial of skillshare premium so you can explore your creativity so a massive thanks to skillshare for sponsoring this video and supporting the channel now back to mountain plastic the third and final product we're going to show you how to make is a simple key ring once you've decided on your shape you should need to follow the same steps as [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] before [Music] since this is just a key ring we didn't want to sand it in any way but we did want to have a slightly smoother finish so we switched back over to the baking paper instead of the teflon sheets as these don't have a texture and it gives an overall smoother finish [Music] so hopefully you found that useful we've popped links to everything that we've used in this video in the description i also want to say a huge thank you to our wonderful patrons these guys massively help support what we do and allow us to keep making videos and if you're new to the channel you may enjoy some of our other videos where we've used pretty much the same technique to make loads of other products but if making is not your thing then we also sell 100 recycled plastic handmade products on our website and our etsy store links in the description down below thanks for watching cheers guys i must look like shopping

Channel: Brothers Make

Views: 388,609

Rating: 4.9046679 out of 5

Keywords: how to recycle plastic, how to melt plastic at home, how to stop plastic getting in the ocean, make sheets of recycled plastic, products made from recycled plastic bottles, how to work with HDPE, recycled projects for school, HDPE, brothers make hdpe, hdpe molding, hdpe recycling, hdpe plastic, hdpe melting, how to melt milk bottle tops, what kind of plastic can be recycled, homemade recycled plastic products, eco friendly products, recycling at home, diy plastic recycling

Id: FpsXvO5LsTY

Length: 11min 15sec (675 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/OatmealResin_DotCom]

Started researching HDPE projects recently and found the videos made by these guys to be very helpful. Check 'em out!