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Collection depot
- This topic has 3 replies, 2 voices, and was last updated 4 years ago by
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Has anybody set up a plastics collection depot before?
I’ve searched the forums and can’t find any info.
I’m attempting to purge my local area of plastic bags. We have loads of biomass boilers here that burn wood pellets that arrive in 100s of plastic bags. Per house! Thats tens of thousands of bags, each month! All LDPE4 according to each manufacturer.
I’ve been inundated with replies to an online post saying I’d send their plastic off to be correctly recycled, rather than burnt, like my local recycle depot does.
Any tips or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Cheers.
Since a good depot is an empty depot, to make your depot an economically viable option, you should check where those collected plastics will be used next. if they happen to get stacked over time, there will be no profit out of it and your business will be doomed to bankruptcy.
Depending on your environment (manufacturers and their ability to work with non-virgin material), your task might be as simple as collecting waste plastic or as difficult as creating new products from what you collect.
Possible tasks :
1. Collecting : You can target the plastics which can get sold/used in a short time before your depot gets full.
2. Sorting : You can sort your waste by plastic known types(1 to 7), and when necessary separate them by contaminant types, or their origin products, this will give your plastic more chance to be requested by a manufacturer, and why not by the same manufacturer who produced it firsthand.
3. Storage : You might need to manage efficiently the storage space of your depot because if you get too much plastic waste from collecting it can get full in no time. The less space your waste takes, the more time you can keep it, and the better the profit you can generate from it and the cheaper you can transport it when necessary. So you will need to compress your plastic in large sized blocks as waste processing facilities do.
4. Cleaning : a cleaner plastic means more possible applications it can be used in, and less time and effort for any manufacturer. Separating plastic by contaminant type can help to use one decontamination (cleaning) technique on a large batch in one go, to make it ready for more uses again.
5. Transporting : Either for your final customer or to other empty depots.
6. Manufacturing : You can either go for a recycled form of your plastic ready to use as raw material by a manufacturer, or produce completely new products from waste. Depending on the type and contaminants, you have lots of choices when it comes to production.
I’ve never worked/owned a depot, and never seen one in person. These are only the technical aspects that have come to my mind.
Explore your environment to check the possibilities and don’t hesitate to start even with a small budget, because if you let the opportunity someone else won’t.
Keep up the good work 🙂
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