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How to shred plastic bags
- This topic has 9 replies, 8 voices, and was last updated 2 years ago by
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There are lots of discussions and ideas on how to make HDPE and LDPE-Bags shredable, but I haven’t seen a tested solution yet.
So I tried it out and even though my shredder isn’t yet built, I can assure you it works! (because the only problem is the thickness)
The concept is simple: just take your iron (the one to iron your clothes), take two sheets of baking paper, put a plastic bag inbetween and iron it!
Then fold it, iron it again and repeat until the piece is thick enough. Voilá!
I tested both HDPE and LDPE bags, they both worked fine. (See pictures)
The only downside of this way of doing it is time. It takes minimum 2 minutes or so to make a 30g LDPE bag thicker (the red one), but apart from that this method works fine for me.
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@flo-2, great job! I recently thought of this exact idea, but realised, that it could be a combined action.
Example: Take a metal bucket, turn it upside down and hang it so that it is not touching anything at the bottom. Place two plastic bags mentioned above on the bucket and fuse them with a powerful hairdryer or a heat gun. Add layers of bags and when you feel comfortable with overall thickness and strength of this, cut the uneven bottom part so that it is horizontal, and you will get a plastic chair.
The drawback of this would be a huge number of bags required and amount of energy used.
@jegor-m thanks!
Yeah, Great Idea! I think it is not necessarily a bad thing to use many bags, that way the product is more stable, you have recycled a lot of otherwise unnecessary plastic bags and can easily recycle the whole thing again!
Also, that way you can recycle plastics without having to build a big and expensive shredder + other machines… 😀
@flo-2 this is an awesome idea considering how difficult it is to find a plastig bags shredder 🙂
I saw this done a while ago and i was thinking about how to do it on a large scale. I came up with heated rollers and passing the bags through the rollers the only problem is evenly heating the rollers to right temperature. Any one got any ideas on how to solve this.
I would think just use an oven to melt them all down. Smash them together to make a bigger mass. Let cool and then shred.
I bought a paper shredder, at 400W it’s designed for office use, cost 440 Euro. It’s ok with more rigid films like crisp bags. It also shreds stretchy polythene like a black bin liner, initially well, but soon jams with overload. Fact is 400W is nowhere near enough power for our need. You know if you try to tear a bin liner by hand, it just stretches
You can get industrial document shedders, about 7K Euro, with 4KW power, as a starting level; or cheaper 2nd hand, but I haven’t tried one
Perhaps pressing with the V4 sheet press into a more solid sheet should enable the V4 shredder to flake it. The math says the square meter, press 1cm thick, will occupy 10 litres, weighing 9 Kg, which is a lot of bags & wrappers to be re-purposed. Anyone with a sheet press willing to try for us ?
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