Interesting idea for plastic trash

[Brian Tymchak]

A little company has a line of products to turn plastic waste into construction block.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/startup-turns-trash-construction-grade-083000732.html

I didn't see (or I missed it) any statement about compressive strength ala using for block foundations.

[Jim Koepke]

Great

jtk

[Maurice Mcmurry]

I got to learn how a transfer station works this summer and I found the experience fairly uplifting. In the small rural community you take your trash to the facility yourself. Recycling is mandatory. Don't even think about putting any recyclable plastic in the trash compactor or not having your stuff all sorted and ready for the various bins. If all you have is big bags that you throw in the compactor without having any glass, plastic, aluminum, steel, paper, couragated cardboard, or wood the whole community knows it and gives you the stink eye. It is not what I expected from a community with a very limited budget. Turns out the motivation is economy. If everyone participates the budget for the transfer station can remain fairly small. It is also a bit of a social event. You get to see and meet your neighbors at the transfer station on Wednesday and Sunday. With permission you can leave or take things from a furniture area, a construction area, and from the scrap iron area. I got permission to cut the cords off of old appliances and wired our shack for 12 volts with recycled wire.

[Charlie Velasquez]

i had had my fifth grade students do some sort of an “original” science experiment as part of their grade. We start the process by having the students list their hobbies, likes and dislikes, or list something they see as a problem that hasn’t been solved. We post these and the rest of the class would spend a week writing questions under their lists. From these we often generated hypotheses that could develop into a research experiment.

In 2004-2005 I had a very talented fifth grade student; he and his family had arrived in Iowa from India. He had identified two serious problems in his native region of India: a glut of used automotive tires discarded into the river that supplied their region’s water and the erosion of the river’s bank caused by the removal of sand for construction concrete and building blocks for burgeoning population.

His project was exactly this.
We have one of the world’s largest tire retreading manufacturers in our community, they supplied him with ground up tire pellets.
He built concrete blocks with rubber pellets instead of sand and other aggregate in various ratios, then tested its breaking strength.

He built his own “press” out of some angle iron, a bathroom scale, and a car jack. When the concrete exceeded the limits of the bathroom scale, he built a lever to increase the force at the pin end. When the concrete exceeded the limits of his modified press, he took it to a machine shop.
A lot of work and analysis in his project.
He eagerly entered the city science fair.

Alas, no happy ending. He received no awards. When I queried the judges, they said it was a very good project, maybe the best of the entire fair (grades 5-12). In fact, they said, it was too good, no fifth grader could have done that project; this despite the fact I watched him do the entire thing himself.

[Maurice Mcmurry]

Charlie, I hope that youngster kept his curiosity and ingenuity. It sounds like he got some praise and encouragement from you.

[Bill Dufour]

Being made from a varying mixture of trash no way those will be certified for permited construction. The only way would be to test each and every block for every possible loading.
Bill D

[Charlie Velasquez]

Charlie, I hope that youngster kept his curiosity and ingenuity. It sounds like he got some praise and encouragement from you.

Yes. He was a gifted athlete also. After fifth grade in my class he was accepted into a private school for gifted athletes in Florida where he had an individualized curriculum.

At the University of Illinois he double majored in Molecular and Cellular Biology and Psychology and graduated magma cum.
Then he graduated from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine with an MD and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business with an MBA.

Currently a resident at Harvard, he spends a lot of time volunteering both medical services and coaching kids.

[Stan Calow]

Bill is right. Since it's a mix of plastic material, you could never have a material strength consistent enough to use for construction. But there could be a lot of uses that dont need that strength.

I remember hearing of a similar process about 15 years ago, looking for investors. The market has to be there first.

[Maurice Mcmurry]

There used to be an image in the photos layer of the old Google Earth. It was on the beach of a tiny island in the Florida Keys. The caption read "Cuban Get-Away Car". It was a lawn chair with fifty or more empty 4L milk jugs tied, lashed, and crocheted to it. I thought it was a clever and humorous way to recycle milk jugs. I wish I had known how to take a screen snip back then.
I see quite a few wood type things made from compressed and fused milk jugs on the web.

509182

[Jerome Stanek]

My grand son has a toy garbage truck that is stamped with how many milk jugs it takes to make it.

[Brian Tymchak]

Along these lines, this article popped into up in my newsfeed yesterday. Looks like true recycling of plastics is getting closer.

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/10/20/ornl-scientists-close-the-cycle-on-recycling-mixed-plastics/

[Bill Dufour]

There used to be an image in the photos layer of the old Google Earth. It was on the beach of a tiny island in the Florida Keys. The caption read "Cuban Get-Away Car". It was a lawn chair with fifty or more empty 4L milk jugs tied, lashed, and crocheted to it. I thought it was a clever and humorous way to recycle milk jugs. I wish I had known how to take a screen snip back then.
I see quite a few wood type things made from compressed and fused milk jugs on the web.

509182
Reminds me of the guy in the aluminum beach chair with all the helium ballons who went for a flight. He had a BB gun to get down.
Bill D

[Brian Elfert]

The ByBlocks are absolutely intended for construction. You have to run threaded rods up through the blocks when building a wall. They also need to be covered with stucco, or some sort of siding. They will take screws.

I am not saying I would use them to build anything. It is unclear if they have an ASTM rating, or anything like that. The data sheet that might have that information is locked down.