How To Recycle HDPE Plastic (High Density Polyethylene) - a simple method

okay I'm going to show you how hdp that's highdensity polyethylene can be recycled on a small scale to make things like this very tough sheet material or this block material as well which can be then turned on a wood turning lathe or worked with hand tools to make things like this spinning top um light pulls small objects like door knobs and so on the source material for this project is this plastic milk bottle and things like this and to identify it as hdp look for this symbol here it's a triangular recycling symbol with the number two or 02 inside and often it will say hdp or PD underneath other items made of HTP are the lid from the same bottle again it's just got the two in the Little Triangle there and this milkshake carton as well this was a carton of milkshake powder it says PhD on there interestingly the lid isn't made of HTP that's made of I don't know if you can see that that's number five inside that triangle and it's polypropylene PP underneath if it's not marked there are ways to tell whether it's polypropylene or um or HTP one thing I found is when you cut HDPE it cuts fairly cleanly it bends without showing any special sort of discoloration or anything if you do the same thing with polypropolene it tends to snap and when you stress it like that it turns white not not entirely reliable but reasonably reliable way of identifying the plastic so in order to process this it all needs to be cut into very small pieces with things like milk bottle tops that's quite easy you just cut them up with strong scissors into little flakes like that some of the larger bottle tops from fizzy drinks and so on aren't always so easy to cut up but you can use um pliers or wire wire cutters to snip those apart so it doesn't have to be particularly even or anything we're just cutting it into small pieces that will be easier to handle and mix I'm going to mix up all the colors together so I end up with a piece that's quite decorative but there's absolutely no reason why you couldn't just process a single color white or or whatever as long as you got enough of it okay and now that we're finished for the day so that I don't make a mess I'm just going to store all of my I'm just going to store all of my pieces inside an uncut bottle I'm Al going to cut up this plastic milk bottle I'll show you the um easiest way to do that Che [Music] for some of the stronger Lids or thicker plastic you you'll struggle to get through them with the scissors so I use a pair of gardening secur for that and I find that will cut those into pieces quite nicely okay this is the fun part this is where we get to actually recycle the plastic and what I'm going to be using for this is this sandwich toaster this is just a very ordinary sandwich toaster it heats up to about 180° which is just the right temperature to melt HTTP into a um thick sticky material without melting it to liquid or burning it to stop it sticking to this this sandwich toaster I'm going to use these um these are just reusable non-stick cooking liners and these are safe these are oven safe these can be heated up to about 260° Centigrade before before they would uh start burning so these are well within our temperature range so I've got about 200 g of mixed cut up HTP plastic from milk bottles and bottle tops cut into small pieces so I'm going to heat up my sandwich toaster first now you might be thinking that I'm a bit mad doing this indoors because of fumes but it just happens that this sandwich toaster heats up to 180 centigrade which is actually just the right temperature to melt hdp into a soft material without burning it so in fact there aren't any fumes when I do this it makes very little smell very little mess okay so my sandwich toaster is up to temperature so now I'm going to add the plastic so I put one of these sheets on the bottom first I'm just going to put a cardboard ring on there and the reason for this is just that when I tip this plastic onto the hot plate to stop it spreading out and spilling all over the place too much at least and so what I'll do now is just very gingerly take that off it's going to spread a bit but not too badly I hope another cooking sheet on top and then we close down the sandwich toaster and I'm just going to leave that for a little while now okay now this is started to melt inside the machine I'm actually just going to clamp the sides of the sandwich toaster down to compress the the hot plates against the material inside takes a little bit of skill to get this right and I don't want to overdo this or else I'll break the thing this just brings this just brings the hot plate into more intimate contact with the with the plastic and gets a better melt as the plastic continues to melt I just periodically tighten these clamps a little bit and it'll just press it down some more okay that's been in there about three minutes now so I'm going to take a look and see how well melted it is I don't I don't expect it to be finished at this stage but let's see if it needs turning around or anything so I just take those clamps off and you'll notice I'm wearing gloves for this this this plastic is is 180° C which is considerably hotter than boiling water and that will do my hands no good at all if I get it stuck on them good it's starting to come together into a solid piece so I'm just I just turned it round and I'm going to close up the the close up the toaster again and clamp it shut okay it's been another few minutes and that should be fully melted now so let's have a look and see what we've got so what I've got inside there is a rather messy piece of hdp plastic now I can't do very much with that as it stands at the moment except we can tidy it up a bit now so what I intend to do it's very sticky that's why I'm wearing gloves if that stuck to my skin I'd be uh in a lot of pain so I'm going to stick those fold those sides in like that peel back the the plastic there peel back the separator sheets get those old bits back in the middle there like that okay now I'm going to put that back in the toaster that way around this time separator sheet back on again and just cook it for another bit longer okay that's been another couple of minutes let's see what we've got now again it's melted very nicely into a single piece of material need to just let it cool for a little while to take the sticky off there we go so so now we've got a nice continuous piece of plastic and again I'm just going to fold this again just to get the corners in just to tidy up the edges so fold those edges into the middle like that and the same again on that side try making it as neat as I [Applause] can okay and then back in the cooker and give it another little clamp now the the benefit of clamping it down each time when I do this is that clamping it will help to drive any little trapped air bubbles in there and it will make sure that all of these layers that we're creating actually aren't layers they just get United and and welded together as a single piece of plastic now unless I choose otherwise this sandwich toaster when it's clamped down like this will spread the the plastic out each time into quite a thin sheet that can be controlled though by just placing a little metal nut in each corner of the sandwich toaster to prevent it closing all the way and the thicker the nut you use obviously the the the thicker the sheet of plastic you'll get out okay let's take one more look it's now been about another couple of minutes that's looking very good now obviously you can control the appearance of this material as well to a certain extent the more times I fold this and process it the more mixed those colors will become but I think that's probably about the effect I'm looking for now and that's probably the thickness I'm looking for as well I don't want go too thick on this stuff I'm just going to take the plastic sheet off and then we're just going to press this flat and let leave it to cool under clamps htpe when it cools shrinks like crazy there's no way to to Really control that you've just got to work with it um it is just one of the properties of this material that as it cools you can expect that to shrink and if you don't if you're not careful as it shrinks it will just distort very badly so the way to get a flat sheet of material is to stick it underneath a board or in between two boards and then clamp it up like that or weigh it down so that's what I'm going to do just clamp that together clamps on each corner and I'm going to leave that to cool for probably a couple of hours that might seem excessive but as I say there's some tremendous stress developing this as it cools and if you leave it to cool on its own in the open air it will buckle and distort and uh won't be any use for anything right it's an hour later now let's see if we're ready okay and there we are our plastic has set into a very nice solid sheet of material it's extremely rigid very strong and this can be cut with hand tools that you might use for woodworking it can be um sanded it can be planed it can be worked in pretty much the same way as you might work wood now if we' folded that several times and left it thicker we'd have a block material that we can cut chunks out of and turn on a wood turning lathe or um saw into cubes or or anything like that

Channel: Atomic Shrimp

Views: 1,326,735

Keywords: craft, recycling, plastic, HDPE, upcycling, howto, hobby, engineering, materials, make, melt, remelt, Making, Crafts, Diy, Do It Yourself (Hobby), High-density Polyethylene

Id: W_XUJwINdLw

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 07 2012