20 Nov Recycling update—not Gaza or Turkey, but Brazil

Posted at 04:04h in That's life by

Thanks to two Contrarian readers called Richard for pointing out that, while that the words corda de varal may mean “let’s reach into the core” in Turkish, they mean “clothesline rope” in Portuguese.

From there it took but a few Google searches to locate the workshop that produced ingenious contraptions for recycling plastic soda bottles into twine and brooms featured here yesterday in Jaru, Brazil, a small city in the western Amazon state of Rondônia.

The maker is Alceu Rocha, better known to his Jaru neighbours as “Gyro Gearloose.” From the Hackaday website:

Not a word of English is spoken in the video, and our Portuguese stops at obrigado, but you don’t really need to understand what’s being said to know what’s going on. Built from what looks to be the running gear of several bicycles and motors from various cast-off appliances, our nameless genius’ machines slit the PET bottles into fine threads, winds the thread onto spools, and braids the threads into heavier cords. We love the whole home-brew vibe of the machines; especially clever is the hacked desk calculator wired to a microswitch to count revolutions, and the salvaged auto jack used to build a press for forming the broom heads. All in all it’s a pretty amazing little factory cranking out useful products from zero-cost raw material.

A Hackaday reader elaborates on the technical obstacles to recycling plastic bottles.:

A major problem with recycling beverage bottles is most of them, except those super thin water ones, are actually made of at least three layers. The inside is always virgin/new PET – to satisfy health and safety. Then there’s a middle layer that’s an oxygen barrier to help the contents stay fresh. The outside usually is partially recycled PET and may contain other plastics.

The bottles start as injection molded preforms with very thick walls and the neck and threads molded. The preforms get clamped into heated molds then air or CO2 or nitrogen is blown in to force the plastic out against the inside of the mold. In that process, the thick preform stretches and thins.

Ah, the internet: a clever video from Brazil, via Turkey, the Gaza Strip, and the nice outreach officer at ACAP Cape Breton, whose FB feed brought it to my attention.