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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Well this is interesting.

    I worked for 7 years at a Swedish company who built granulators, Rapid Granulator AB. I worked stateside though as the only electrical technician.

    From what I could glean about the machinery we built and sold, they would say that the only viable way to recycle plastic is as it was being manufactured. So say you’re a facotry making hundreds of garbage cans a day. All the rejects (wrong chemical makeup, big bulge from the molding process, etc) would go into a granulator for “recycling”. The granulator grinds it down into small pellets which are then used at the beginning of the line.

    From what I remember, customers were very very picky about what could be used after granulation. A little bit of the wrong color of dye would ruin a whole batch for instance. I’m curious to see exactly how this site zero plans to recycle waste products coming from the general population, on an engineering / technical level…

    This, of course, is also dancing around the fact that it’s a bit of an open secret that most places in America do not recycle. And I’m talking systemically, not on an individual level. In my county I know that all recycling goes to the exact same landfill as all the trash. It’s a bit hard to feel hopeful when the USA sends 242 million pounds of plastic straight to the ocean every year. I felt a little better about it when China would sort through and recycle our plastics.