Making stuff out of garbage would make me feel like Tony Stark.
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.
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.
- 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.
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
Do they use deep learning yet?
Most likely they just use cheap labor for sorting
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.
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/witness/2015/05/unwasted...
Including one that goes into depth about sorting: http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/12/recycling-matching-hi...
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.
In the states, we could use it in a different way; to encourage community. If nobody recycles their goods, industrial processes can't help. Watching these machines and immediately building a new thing out of them really drives home the usefulness of recycling. It's 'cool' to watch and fun to do.
I grew up in Houston, Texas; some people recycled sometimes, but most people I knew (in affluent areas, so plenty of waste and education) just didn't care. My college apartment complex didn't have recycling at all despite a center within 10 minutes.
Our fathers mostly worked in oil / fossil fuels, where environmentalists block critical infrastructure for both good and inane reasons. (One inane example, a small town refused to allow an increase in the throughput of a natural gas pipe extending along a river; this put it at higher risk of explosion). People who recycle are the enemy; they are the guys preventing them from doing their jobs.
I want to build one of these with my dad and set it up so that the neighbors and their kids can come by, watch the plastic churn and have a new doodad to bring home. He would love it, they would love it (minus some terrified parents) and it would be a pretty great thing all around.
- The outputs of this recycling tech can be fed into personal fabrication tech (3D printers, etc.)
- Power generation is decentralized (solar, etc.)
It's part of a set of tech that would allow for the localization of manufacturing, closing the whole lifecycle locally. This in turn brings things back to the community. It's not always about total energy efficiency.
I can:
Building a plastic recycling plant is out of reach for most of the people almost everywhere and requires industry while building those machines though requiring tools and skills is totally doable in a local workshop.
The precious plastic project allows a handful of individuals to a local operation. A village can be equipped with those machines and beyond picking the local plastic waste and reusing it, it also offers the possibility to not throw the waste away.
Here we have recycling plants, but it seems no one actually knows how they're operated, what they actually recycle from what is burned or buried and there are no obvious resulting products. What we do know is that they are expensive, financed by taxes and there are lots of constraints.
I'd rather have a place run by locals where I can get some new objects and material for a 3d printer.
Thermoset plastics will not melt and will release all sorts of magnificent things when heated.
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'
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 :-)
> 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.
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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.
Why don't you send an email to point out the mistakes in their text? [1]
They might even appreciate it :)
This is not out of reach, they managed to build those in Africa with whatever was available.