Recycling Plastic

This week I am lifting content straight from my university work, Yesterday I handed in and presented my first project in the course 'Experimenting with materials'. The project focussed on taking a material and destroying it in order to make something new. Destructive Creation. We worked with physical techniques such as smashing, heating techniques such as melting, and chemical techniques such as rusting. Read on for more.

Heres what Interested me about this project:

Over the course of my university life I have been able to define myself as a designer by what interests me and what I think is important. The two things that this comes down to are
1: D.I.Y., The culture that surrounds it, the practice of doing it, and all of the benefits that go along with that.
2: Sustainability, creating in a sustainable way that does not impact the earth negatively, whether this be recycling old materials, making the most of green spaces, or any number of other things.

Our second lecture of this course was inspiring to say the least. As soon as I saw the calm waves seen  of the video below I knew I was watching something special. It contains all things that I love, DIY, Sustainability, Film, Fire, Re-use, and beautiful scenery to name a few.

I'll try not to get too poetic about my feelings towards this video, but I thought two things after watching this video for the first time. 1. Why aren't more people doing this, and 2. I have to do this.

After a small internet search  I found a couple of lo-fi, videos showing that people already are doing this on an amateur level.
See the videos here for a gow to turn old plastic into a new and beautiful slingshot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_XUJwINdLw
Melting plastic into a brick.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyZMWLkcfes
Turning plastic into a slingshot.

Needless to say it was my turn to have a go.
I started with a walk on my local beach in Makara.

My girlfriend Shellie and I walked the beach for 40 minutes filling our buckets to the top. There were bottle caps and plastic rope, and all other plastic crap you can think of.

Back at home this is our haul.
Before I could use it it needed to be sorted and washed.

Here is your daily dose of disturbing images.

As seen here, plastic discarded from people everyday that gets washed down rivers and out into the ocean gets mistaken for food by birds such as the three species of endangered albatross (There are a further 19 species of threatened albatross).

In an ideal world everyone would go out into the ocean, or down to the beach, fish out some old plastic, and use that instead of making more new stuff.

I want to work further in the area of plastic recycling, below are some of my experiments.

My first experiment was indoors on a kitchen element. The plastic melted to the extent that it was maleable but still identifiable, this created a vibrantly coloured bottle top pancake.

From this point on I opted for outdoor cooking. Using an open fireplace would give me a more intense heat, and being outside meant I wouldn't need to worry about getting bad smells throughout the house. My second attempt created a large creen/grey sheet, solid, yet able to be cut into pieces.

My next piece comprised two seperate cooks merged together, the first was perfect, using colourful plastic ropes. The second was awful, it burnt and turned to charcoal, I had used a rubbish grade of plastic. However, I was still able to chop and drill into the block.

Now I would focus my experiments a little more.

My first focussed experiment. Melting milk bottles into a goo I poured it into a cubic mould. Once cooled and removed from the mould it was scalded on the outside, once sanded away it unveiled the light coloured marbling seen here.

The next experiment was melted to extreme heats to the point that the plastic turned to liquid. The molten plsatic was poured into a mould and after bubbling, cracking and eventually setting and cooling I took to it with a band saw, exposing these brilliant marbling patterns.

My final experiment had colour. Vibrant colours that I wanted to bring out and expose. By drilling through it I exposed the colours hidden in the center.

Although it does just look like a block with holes in it, that isn't the point. The point is that by creating your own plastic mould you can create anything. Any shape that you can come up with has the potential to be made out of the rubbish found on the beach.

A very exciting prospect.


If you were curious about the end results of my first project in experimenting with materials have a look here:
http://jrhdsdn.blogspot.co.nz/2015/08/final-digital-hand-in-project-1.html

And here is the rest of my Design blog if that interests you:
http://jrhdsdn.blogspot.co.nz/search?updated-min=2015-01-01T00:00:00%2B13:00&updated-max=2016-01-01T00:00:00%2B13:00&max-results=20