Recycling Plastics At Home

Reason: so lots of little plastic bits and scraps, and, worst of all, bags, don't end up ... in the sea.

You may send your plastics somewhere for recycling, but who knows what actually happens to them.

One nice thing would be to know. I do want to build a tool for documenting that. What's a tool? Maybe it's an organization. How would one go about that? People who know how to answer that could leave suggestion in the comment area of this post, or at my e-mail.

But, if the scraps and bags never leave our houses, so much the better. My idea is to make them into solid blocks that will only come apart as their surfaces crumble ... they'll never come apart into scraps and bits again. This is a chemistry problem and a mechanical engineering problem. It would be interesting to document the chemistry of plastics, here. As far as the mechanical issues go, I suppose we're talking about a pressure vessel and a controlled method for heating it, and then the resulting block of polymer needs to be broken out of it, so a releasing agent is needed, and so on.

Special topic: styrofoam! At present, no one is even taking it for recycling. Processing it ourselves is as close to a viable option as anything!!!

Final note: the real answer is developing alternatives for, especially, food packaging.