from Hacker News

Open-Source Recycling

by pelim on 4/20/16, 9:40 AM with 40 comments

  • by herbst on 4/20/16, 10:04 AM

    While i nether have the room nor the time to do this, i love the idea. I also love the "Why" section of the website, so simply yet so mighty.

  • by smellf on 4/21/16, 1:11 AM

    I wonder if this project is based off the earlier Recyclebot? That was something I'd wanted to build for a long time.

    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.

  • by agumonkey on 4/20/16, 11:26 AM

    Always wanted to do this, but I was afraid reprocessing plastics would release toxic fumes or hard to detect dangers for the average guy. I can't stand throwing things anymore.

  • by pingec on 4/20/16, 11:03 AM

    A positive thing for sure. But the hardest part is not the processing, it`s the sorting of different types of plastic and the washing phase if required.

  • by aznpwnzor on 4/20/16, 4:35 PM

    Someone who knows more should prove me wrong, but...

    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.

  • by winterismute on 4/20/16, 12:03 PM

    My wife was wondering whether this can be considered 100% healthy: don't you need plastic to reach a very high temperature to model it that way? Doesn't it start releasing whatever thing that might be carcinogenic or such?

  • by fake-name on 4/20/16, 4:58 PM

    From http://preciousplastic.com/machines/

    > 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.

    ----

    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.

  • by Fastidious on 4/20/16, 2:57 PM

    Not everyone has the skills, nor the tools to do this. I love the idea, and wish someone would make the machines (or the entire kits to assemble at home). I would buy them!

  • by asimuvPR on 4/20/16, 1:15 PM

    I've been looking for something like this for a while. Was already thinking on developing mynown machines but this just saved me lots of resources. Great project!