Reduce Household Waste By Recycling At Home.
I'm going to talk a bit about how to recycle plastic at home. At your home, at your community, at your town. It's one of the things that I think will be quite effective at a local scale, diverting some of the waste stream and repurposing it.
And I know that at the sheer scale of waste we generate, it'll just be a drop in the ocean. (Coincidentally, as I'm writing this there's an item on the radio about microplastics in the oceans - and yes, that link is a hint to go donate them because they are still collecting plastic trash at the time I write this, as far as I know . . .)
But it'll do something. Little by little, hub by hub, small local scale recycling projects will spring up and take some of the pressure off the infrastructure. Energy is only going to get cheaper and more plentiful, and recycling will only get higher and higher in public awareness, and before long some clever people will get ideas about using mostly energy-based approaches and suddenly waste will be worth recycling.
The sooner this happens the better - and I've now dedicated all my blogs online to this cause, in one way or another they'll all refer to these sorts of waste / environmental / sustainability issues, if sometimes only tangentially. You can check them out here or just jump in and subscribe to a once weekly newsletter, I promise I'll do my best to provide interesting and amusing content. Meanwhile, back to the article:
We composted our kitchen waste and used that in our vegetable garden. But nowadays quite a lot of it bypasses us and goes straight into our council compost bin. I admit that isn't ideal - but we've recently lost 95% of our gardenable area due to the landlord splitting the block to add a second unit, and so our vegetable raised garden beds now total perhaps 6sqm with a further 2sqm growing in pots and containers, and so there's not a lot of compost needed.
As it's going to the local Council to be turned into compost anyway so I don't feel bad about it, but I do feel the loss of 150sqm of yard of which 70 or so was garden beds. I miss having the fresh vegetables to cook for us. We made the best of the smaller area (~15sqm but we wanted a livable ornamental garden as well) with the cannibalised raised beds to the tune of five 1sqm raised beds and four strips between them for pots. If we'd had the money I'd have also put some aquaponics along the fence and in the shadow of the house, but we're pensioners so . . . it'll have to wait.
With recycled plastics and 3D printing I'm hoping to (one day when I have some of that precious commodity, "spare time") actually start expanding our grow space with a small aquaponic system around the garden beds. Any and all of which will end up online for others to copy or draw inspiration from. Then some more kitchen waste could be fed to the fish. The thing is, I can also make plant clips, watering spikes, and other small fittings from recycled materials and sell or trade them to complete my setup.
(Important random thought: Don't wonder if there's "a place that does recycling in my area," start one. I've been doing just that and I hope what I'm doing will inspire you to get out there and start a recycle space wherever you are.)
That's always been one of my go-to things, get talking to workmates and neighbours, find the people that are up for swaps and sharing, and next thing you're trading two bunches of parsley and a kilo of tomatoes for a couple of fresh-caught sand whiting, or a few plant clips printed with recycled HDPE for a left over length of 150mm PVC pipe for making aquaponics setups. And in the process, I raise awareness of recycling and all the issues surrounding it. And I might inspire one other person to either work with me to create our community hub or start recycling their own plastic.
For that reason I also talk to people about recycling household waste - from offering our kitchen scraps to home composters to collecting plastic bottle caps and nursery plant pots from neighbours and giving them a unique recycled plastic plaque or a heap of plant tie clips in return. The important thing is that we all have to keep doing whatever we can. My blog is one of my ways for me to share.
Recycling Plastic 101
I've started collecting a few similar plastics from other people, and those flat sheets have made a couple of rather nice and unique looking house numbers. I 3D printed the letters and numerals and bonded them on. Sorry, don't have pictures but I'll remember to do it next time.
And it's one of the simpler recycle projects you can do, but very showy. If you need to convince people that plastic recycling is useful and attractive, having a few sample sheets like the above is one of your best allies.
I'm planning on starting a hub that does recycling but the hurdles are a bit high, you need to find a very cheap industrial unit with power and running water connected, find workbenches / tables, machines, and of course a group of people to join in and do something too. I need help - your help - with that.
I'm envisaging something like a makerspace, but for recycling. I've spoken to a few local businesses and as soon as I find a place larger than my pocket-sized plastics workshop on the veranda I'll start setting up. For now I'm doing my 'cottage industry scale' research . . .
There's also the matter of other waste stream materials that could be recycled. With some care, collected plastics can be turned into useful parts with injection molding. Also, some molds can be 3D printed in higher-temperature plastics, making this a completely recycled plastic cycle. I've been researching and designing and all that's holding me back is that I can't get parts and materials fast enough.
Using a home-brewed manual injection molding machine you can churn out several hundred reusable plastic plant support clips per day. Give them away to members - but maybe also sell some at local flea markets and swapmeets to pay the electric bill. You can make keychain carabiners, keytags, a range of fittings and hardware (I've seen one video of making plaster and masonry rawlplugs five to a mold and a mold every few minutes so that by the end of an hour they'd have 60 - 120 rawlplugs that can be differentiated because they're recycled locally and that makes a difference, believe me.)
Make artisan house number plaques - that carry the cachet of being recycled and eco-friendly - and sell those online. If you have no 3D printer for making numerals you can make sheets of a solid contrasting colour and cut the numerals out with a craft knife or a fretsaw then use a suitable glue to attach them to the plaque.
And another beauty of recycling plastic is that all the scraps and offcuts can go back to be recycled again. There's a free design for carabiner-style key clips on Precious Plastic's Bazar, you can even order the injection mold from them or make it yourself if you're good with a CNC mill.
But. . .
There is so much more recycling can do. By printing molds in recycled plastic you can not just injection mold more recycled plastic, you can also make molds to process cardboard and paper into useful items.
With cardboard, paper, and some binder like flour or rice, you can make cardboard papier mache, press that in a pair of mold halves, and create eco-friendly desktop pencil holders, or nursery plant pots that can be buried with the plant when the time for planting comes. (If you have a local nursery you may even come to a great deal with them and have an entire business stamping out thousands of pots per year for them.
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| This sort of shape is possible to press from waste cardboard. |
With proper support and hard plastic molds you can even stamp thin metals to form parts and fittings and things like keytags. Get that thin metal from tin and aluminium cans, pick an interesting part of the design on the can, and stamp it.
These are just a few ways to use more and more of the waste stream and stop it before it hits landfills and the water table. And while aluminium and tinplate can be recycled easily at a large facility, there's no reason not to use the resource ourselves, directly, and just send the offcuts on. (Bonus for the upstream recycling facility - they'll receive metals all cleaned and sorted according to type.)
What's needed are machines that can either be cheaply bought and adapted (like the sandwich press I've been using) for purpose, machines that are easy and cheap to manufacture, and techniques and methods for using these materials for all manner of useful and decorative products.
For instance, you can make a press with iron and wood scraps and a car jack, which will let you press those metals and papier-mache and hot plastics into various shaped molds, and with a bit of tech know-how and some relatively inexpensive and simple parts you can make a manual plastic injection machine.
An old wheelie bin, some fittings and baskets, and an old pressure washer can make a very efficient and useful plastic washing machine. The only thing that's still difficult to achieve is a grinder to turn large plastic pieces into granule and flake stock suitable for processing, but I have a few ideas ticking over for as soon as I can buy the relevant hardware and do some R&D.
(Speaking of recycled plastic stock, there's nothing to stop you from sorting, grinding, and washing plastic granules or flakes and selling them to a plastic recycler. It's a legit way to recycle local waste and get it re-used.)
I've also trialled ironing plastics onto material to make prints on fabric, and also used heavier cloth and plastics to make a few light thin sheets of waterproof material to build project cases from. And I bought that sandwich press to make the flat sheets, and as mentioned also attempting to develop a few more purpose-built machines that can be used to recycle other things.
Just on the topic of cloth/plastic hybrid materials, there are heaps of design ideas partly scribbled on paper or still locked away in my head that just need me to have a collaborator or two, some extra income to buy machines and modify them, and turn out LARGE sheet materials that could be used as structural and decorative construction materials. Wall and ceiling panels, plates for joining geodesic dome struts, that kind of thing.
Home Scale Cottage Industry Style Recycling
I have this idea that our waste problems need to be tackled at multiple levels - it's all right to expect corporations to clean up the mess they've left - but you know they won't want to spend money doing it until the very last possible moment. So as usual it's up to us.
And also, large scale recycling is always going to be more wasteful in the long run because of - well, because if you're dealing with someone else's rubbish and turning it into raw materials for - someone else somewhere else so who cares really? It ends up being "just doing my job" and so it ends up inefficient and wasteful itself. It's one of the reasons corporations are so blase about committing - well, food fraud, for example.
Someone earning a pittance in a grotty factory in a third world country doesn't really care if the berries that they're packing for someone (that they'll never see nor hope to live even half as well as) have some spots of fungus on them. "Eff 'em, I have a family to provide for" I believe would be the thought foremost in their minds.
This is one reason I think that 'grass roots recycling' can help. It can take some garbage out of the waste stream, yes. But that's not the primary reason it'll help. It makes the waste problem up close and personal. If there's a local recycling community operating, a lot of people will get up close and personal with waste - and attitudes will change.
It's YOUR community and YOUR region that will benefit, and it won't be done for the money but for the actual results, for the cleaner streets, the cleaner air, the number of things that the waste can be recycled into for making things unique to YOUR area.
The central concept is a recycle space, an "RCX-AU hub." And even that name is a compromise and a promise, it comes from a Stargate episode you probably know but had to be added to because a) name conflict and B) adding a country code will make it a little bit more local.
Also, I think being a not for profit is the best way to start because to begin with it'll need volunteers to get going. But there's nothing to stop a group from making their hub a business from the get-go and benefiting from the positive publicity from RCX-xx branding.
Your work in starting such a space could result in awareness that helps tip the scales and create even wider ripples of waste recycling awareness. Wider awareness could push the zero-emissions date closer by a decade or more. (Let's face it, we should have been divesting ourselves of fossil fuels twenty to forty years ago.) And one of the things I started with - the oceans - are in real trouble right now, don't HAVE ten more years, and could face an almost total extinction event if we don't stop NOW.
If you like this article please share it. If you'd like more, please sign up for an email newsletter here. And if you want to get into local recycling, take a sneak peek here. Lastly, if you'd like to help me develop the next machines and pay for the server and domain names and research, please donate here or go to Ko-Fi.Com and buy me a coffee a month to help.
And as I always say - get angry, get activated, write emails, sign petition, contribute, donate - the planet needs us right now.
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