Equipment & materials
Equipment
You will need:
- Plastic / plastic collection / community
- Testing infrastructure (professional / DIY)
- A recycling workshop (big/small scale) with:
- Buckets – for density measurement and washing
- Shredder (e.g. Precious Plastic)
- Hot process: Sheet press, injector, extruder or oven
- Basic tool set
- Workshop space
How the Flipflopi did it...
The Flipflopi has:
R&D equipment:
- Precious plastic shredder
- Bicycle shredder
- Precious plastic extrusion
- Precious plastic injection
- Filament maker
- DIY sheet press (1×1 foot)
- Small bending setup
- Large bending setup (up to 2 meters and 1×1 foot diameter)
- Scales
Production equipment:
- Space
- Sorting tables
- Band-saw
- Scales
- Hydraulic Baler
- Two large shredders (xx)
- Agglomerator (60kg/h)
- Extruder (60kg/h)
- Xx moulds (1×4 inch – 7×7 inch)
- Hydraulic demoulding setup
- Plastic welding guns
- Fully equipped carpentry
We use it for:
- Making planks and beams (low-pressure injection molding with our extrusion machine)
- Making custom moulded boat parts (ribs etc) with our adjustable moulding system
- Shredding plastic
- Baling PET
- Agglomerating bags and soft plastics into a granulate to feed into the extruder
- Planks and beams to build boats and furniture
We would love to have:
Production
- A big sheet press – we are building one right now
- Large filament extruder
- Granulator
- Professional washing and drying setup
- Mixing
- Extruder with vacuum extraction and filters
Research and Development
- Microscope
- Spectroscopy FTIR or NIR
- Universal test bench
- Small granulator (or chopper after filament)
- UV laser to mark information on the samples
Material sourcing & analysis
You will find that the majority of your plastics fall into common categories like HDPE, PP and PET. To see how to identify and sort these common plastics see Sorting plastics.
- SOP Plastic Testing
- Flipflopi (WIP) – Material Research & Analysis (including soft plastics, PP, 7×7’ beam etc.)
