Orange Bag Plastic Experimental Lab

Lately, I’ve been trying to find out more about what happens with our trash - I toured the Ada County Landfill a while back , and this week, I’m talking about a tour of an interesting place that works on “What you can do with random plastics?” from the Boise Orange Bag program (whatever they happen to be calling it this week). Scott Phillips is a local professor with a very interesting little “plastics research lab” buried in a small industrial building, and he’s been working on what, exactly, you can do with the random mixed plastics coming out of the waste stream in Boise. Art Results One of the major things Scott has been doing with the plastic waste is creating “modern art” - but out of reused plastics. All of the pieces here - both epoxied and polished, or raw - are created with plastic coming out of the waste stream in various forms. The results are certainly interesting! This is a large piece with about an inch of epoxy on top of it, though the plastic debris is at various depths in it. Another large piece resembles water and ice floes - but it’s entirely waste plastic and a layer of epoxy! Most of the “black and white” pieces he produces are made out of waste lumber wrap - the plastic tarp that wraps the bricks that dimensional lumber ships in. They’re a plastic tarp weave and hard to process, but twisting them and applying heat and pressure turns them into some interesting patterns. Add epoxy and some higher contrast material, and you get something like this out of the lumber overwrap. Frame the stuff, give it a coat of epoxy, and you’ve got either interesting coasters, or something that could be hung on a wall. Again, all of this is recycled plastic! Grinding it Down Most of the techniques being developed here start with taking bulk mixed plastic and turning it into very tiny chunks. A bunch of sharp steel cutter wheels do this job quite well - and, in line with the R&D focused nature of this lab, they make their own cutters out of hardened steel plates.…