Abstract
High demand for plastic worldwide has resulted in increasing environmental pollution. To make the plastic manufacturing process more environmentally friendly, recycling of waste plastic must be considered. In view of this a social enterprise called Me.reka Makerspace aims to use waste plastic to produce recycled plastic products using injection molding. However, injection molding is a complex process. In the past Me.reka experienced numerous failures resulting in defective plastic products and cost wastage. To assist with Me.reka’s objective, this study aimed to recommend a process capable of producing good quality recycled plastic products that meet dimensional accuracy and surface roughness requirements. Literature review done on plastic waste separation techniques, plastic properties testing for injection molding, and ventilation systems. Manual plastic sorting was found to be the best for Me.reka, where it can separate all 7 types of plastics collected by Me.reka with the highest accuracy and efficiency and the lowest cost. The melt flow rate of specific plastic type can determine its compatibility for use in the injection molding machine. Furthermore this study found that the best ventilation system for Me.reka Makerspace’s plastic injection molding facility was the displacement ventilation. It is expected that with the installation of an efficient ventilation system, the hazardous gasses produced during the process will be efficiently expelled thus protecting the health of workers. With regards to injection molding, a mold design was made for a book cover mold by applying the applicable mold design principles. However, this mold was later sent for testing at another facility. A flowerpot mold that had arrived at Me.reka which required immediate testing was tested instead. Through testing, improvements were made to the mold and the molding process by finding out the optimum injection molding temperature for the waste plastic used and the mold sprue diameter required to produce a well formed molding.
Highlights
Plastics have large chain like molecules, they are a polymeric material which consists of various types of elements such as oxygen, hydrogen, chlorine, carbon, and sulfur
Me.reka only uses plastic type 2 (HDPE) and plastic type 5 (PP) to perform injection molding machine, while the other types plastic collected will be mixed and shredded to squeeze into a plastic bottle, which is known as plastic brick
There had been studies done on injection molding using raw thermoplastics
Summary
Plastics have large chain like molecules, they are a polymeric material which consists of various types of elements such as oxygen, hydrogen, chlorine, carbon, and sulfur. Within half a century the world’s annual consumption of plastic increased 20 times, at 5 million tons in the 1950s to 100 million tons in 2004 [2]. The escalating growth of plastic consumption has resulted in significant increase in the pressure to recycle as the production of new plastics will contribute greatly to reduction of raw material, as well as pollution to the environment [3,4]. Most plastics are polymetric materials that is nonbiodegradable with no capability of being self-decomposed by bacteria and pose a growing threat to the environment. More problems arise with the disposal of plastic wastes since landfill is limited [5]. Recycling of waste plastics will help mitigate these problems. Compared to producing new plastics, recycling of plastics consumes 70% less energy [6] and reduces environmental damage
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