Saturday, October 6, 2012

Plastics recycling part II

In the previous article, I had mentioned how to start a plastics recycling business. Of course, it was about the basics of collection and segregation of waste plastics and grinding them in to usable plastics chips. Since consumer durables accumulate quite an amount of dirt, it is impossible to recycle them as it is. The easiest way to use them without having to spend any further is washing them. Washing of plastics chips should be done with due care. Using detergents or soap will burn a hole in your pocket. The best thing to clean the plastics chips is using caustic soda. Caustic soda is a powerful cleaner that can blow away any dirt in the plastics chips.

However, caustic soda is highly corrosive material and proper handling should be taken care of. While small quantities of plastics chips can be manually washed, washing machines designed for the specific purpose are available in the market. Tons and tons of plastics chips can be washed in a day’s time if you use one. Once the plastics chips are washed you need to dry them in the sun. Drying the wet plastics chips in the sun is the cheapest way to get rid of humidity in the material.
 
If you are planning to use the cleaned plastics chips for production purposes, you need to pre heat them for effective use. Beware humidity in plastics chips can create high pressure in the barrel of the moulding machines and can result in explosion. Both electric heaters and mechanically heating machines are available in the market. You need to ensure that the plastics chips are hot while they are being mixed with the virgin material during production process.

Friday, October 5, 2012

Recycling of plastics: Making of the plastics chips



Plastics is one of the most used materials in the world, when it comes to day to day life. Use and throw plastics articles create the worst pollution that mankind had ever seen in its history. Water and soil pollution are the two major yet preventable effects of plastics. The well known solution to this environmental problem is recycling of plastics. Recycling plastics not only helps us in reducing pollution but also has positive financial impacts to the businesses. 

Industrial plastics waste can be recycled without having to do much segregation work. However plastics from consumer waste do need segregation work.  It needs trained hands to separate different kinds of plastics. Some of the commonly used plastics in the day to day usage include HDPE, LDPE, PP, ABS, PVC, and the like. It is easy to identify the type of plastics used for making specific goods. For example, most Electrical wire insulating pipes are made of PVC,  and LDPE is used in a major way when it comes to packing liquids like milk and oil.

However, when it comes to things like bucket, mug, and other utilities, several types of plastics are used. One can make a bucket using HDPE as well as PP.  Manufactures use different materials in order to make their products cheaper and durable. In such cases there are a few simple tests that can help you in identifying the type of material used for making the object. Well I shall discus the identification of plastics for recycling in a different post. It is important that the color separation must be done during this stage.
 
Once the segregation is done, the plastics materials should be shredded into tiny pieces using a shredder which is also termed as a grinder. The size of the chips produced by grinding or shredding waste plastics can be determined by the size of holes in the mesh.  There are traders that can purchase these plastics chips as such without any further process. This is the simplest form of business in the plastics recycling arena.