I'm collecting bottle caps

A few months ago I did some work for a lady who makes these cute little turtle keyrings. They are multi-coloured plastic keyrings that she sells and/or gives away to raise awareness about plastic pollution of the oceans.

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Having been in the environmental industry for a while, I've read the statistics and I have seen the casualties of it both on land and in water first hand. I'm not going to go into that side of it here because it's horrendously depressing and I don't want my blog to be a place of shitty depressing posts, the world out there is bad enough as it is, we don't need any more reminders thanks. I'd rather do stuff in my own capacity to make changes however small they may be.

I learned a few things from her while in conversation and I decided that I might as well follow her lead and make some use out of the HDPE plastics that I have since been collecting. Went and looked up videos this morning and holy moly, there are some fooking awesome goodies that you can make with this plastic.

The plastic is HDPE which stands for High-density polyethylene. It carries the little recycle triangle with the number 2 inside it. It is derived from petroleum (as with most plastics) and has a pretty good strength to density ratio which makes it easily workable. It's also the least toxic plastic to melt down, they claim it doesn't emit toxic fumes because of its low melting point. You can make stuff out of it using an oven or sandwich press! You can even use a heat gun. I think that's pretty nifty.

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There are a few companies who are now selling rigs specifically for recycling this type of plastic - they have machines for crunching it into finer bits (making plastic sawdust essentially) extruders, presses, heat ovens etc etc. They aren't cheap at 6000 Euros a pop and unless you are planning on actually making a business out of this kind of product creation, seems a bit overkill. I'll just be experimenting with basic stuff and using things that I already have - you can use silicon baking moulds coated with silicon spray in a conventional oven or you can use metal objects as moulds.

Because I bake, I have a vast selection of metal cookie cutters and I'm thinking of making cookie cutter shapes out of the marbled plastic sheets. Maybe I can create some kind of boardgame or something and those would be the different player pieces that you move around...these are just ideas at this point really.

The part that has been intriguing today is looking around and seeing what kind of plastic stuff is made from HDPE and what's not. It's one of the more common plastics for holding liquids (both food and non food grade). So far I've found the following:

Caps from milk cartons
Most plastic caps off soft drink bottles
The base of a salt shaker
Bleach bottle bases
Fabric detergent bottle bases
Some lids off lotion bottles

I've found yellow, blue and white.

It's probably still going to take me a while to collect enough of this plastic to have a nice variety of colours but I don't want to be spending any money on this endeavour - I have a sandwich press and cookie cutters so that's where I'll start and from there who knows. I think it's a kinda cool crafting idea to use plastic that otherwise would have ended up in the landfill. I know it's not a solution to plastic pollution, but it's a small effort in that direction and it's something that I believe would make a difference on a large scale - if everyone changed their daily habits slightly, we could effect some change. I think it's a perfectly good habit to instill in my daughter early on as well.

I also recycle cardboard from the 6 pack milk carton carriers and turn them into cat scratching posts, but that's a story for a different day.

Let me know what you would choose to make with this kind of recycled plastic?

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