Hi. Hugely inspired by the PP community. I do hope this isn’t a controversial topic, but there is definitely an opportunity to design a different type of machine.
MACHINE #1
A machine that takes good quality single use plastic bags, and converts them to multi use. My own ideas for creating this would be to repair any small rips in the bags by melting and patching, then adding a resealing ‘zip’. The repairing would probably have to be human powered, but creating a slit in the top seam of a bag and adding in pre-made zips could be automated to speed things up.
Last night I put a listing on an online forum near where I live, to see if I could try to collect other people’s plastic bags (biomass pellet sacks, films etc) and I’ve been inundated with people who have been stock piling their plastic, as our local depot doesn’t recycle LDPE4. By the end of January, I will have close to 1000 plastic bags. I have several hundred in my own garage!
MACHINE #2
A machine that takes good quality, clean, single use plastic bags, and puts them back onto a roll. I guess it would have to fully open the bags, clean any residue, melt them together to form a continuous strip, then roll them up, probably cutting off any messy edges. Easy!
The rolls could be sold back to industry, reducing their need to buy virgin plastic.
Any suggestions, advice, or contact from people interested in creating a new machine would be greatly appreciated! Cheers
As for the first machine. While you are at it with repairing the plastic bags, you might as well double up on the bags to make it more durable. check the video from PP:
I think the three options for attachment of seams are sewing (with a sewing machine etc), thermal welding (with a heat gun), or ultrasonic welding (this is done for competative swiming “tech suits” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-technology_swimwear_fabric)
So i’d say focus on the fabric sheet producing device as that is the real hurdle here.
Hi @clementhempel I had imagined the second machine would make a huge roll of film that could be sent back to the bag producing factory and fed straight back into their machine to produce another load of bags. Their machines would need to be fitted with slightly different parts to cope with the plastic, but I think it’d be worthwhile to get factories using recycled plastic more. The bags I’m talking about are really good quality, not supermarket flimsy things.
