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How much plastic is in a bag? And how to get it into a tube.

A project log for Dad, let's recycle the bag! Can I recycle the bag?

entertainment, warm fuzzy feelings, and a little reward for recycling that plastic bag

shlonkinshlonkin 05/09/2016 at 13:460 Comments

How much plastic are we talking about? Just to see, I grabbed a medium size bag and melted it down with a heat gun. When it was nice and gooey I pressed it flat with a jar that apparently had the number 25 cast on the bottom. This is what it looked like.

It weighs about 5 grams and is probably loaded with air bubbles. If it were properly compressed before melting it would probably have much less air and thus be much smaller. Ideally it would be shredded into small bits and compressed so there would be no trapped air inside, but shredding is not as easy as it sounds. Just to see if it were possible I ran a bag through my paper shredder and then spent 30 minutes pulling out bits of plastic that were wedged between the cutters.

How do I get it into the tube? That's a big question. I've been thinking about it and experimenting with various ideas.

But after much effort trying to get a bag into a tube I found that by far the easiest, simplest, and most reliable way to do it is by hand.

There are some downsides to this method. Since the human is responsible for sticking the thing in the place it is necessary for the human to be intelligent and not want to break the machine for fun. That's asking a lot of the general masses. But for the sake of prototyping and getting a working device built, I will assume it's possible. If this turns into a realistic recycling option, I'll have to be more careful.

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