PLASTICS-RECYCLING

4th Semester | Workshop

The "Plastics Forge" of the organization Konglomerat e.V. from Dresden organised a workshop during our yearly open-door event "Campus.Design Open" about recycling of plastics.

They brought a selfmade shredder, a manual plastification unit and a lot of plastic waste. After a short introduction about injection molding, we directly started with the creation of our own molds. Every participant designed a own recycling product within one hour and created a pattern for the mold. Using a laser cutter, a simple injection mold was cutted out from some sheet of acryl glass.

With some sense in pressure, the colourful melted plastics were pushed into the mold. Despite of the very simple structure - a car-jack wasn't uninvolved in the process at all - the result really looked very well!

My result was a keyring smartphone holder.

It consists of two equal parts, casted in one shared mold.

Together with an key ring, both support parts can be spread apart on a table and hold a inserted smartphone. The gadget can be used for selfies or watching videos on the way.

The workshop shows practically how easy it is to recycle plastics for producing small-batch series inside the Maker-Movement.

It proofs the big potential of a material that's usually thrown away and why plastic seperation is important for the recycling process.