[hinkley]

15KW to make a single sheet of plastic. That is practically the entire capacity of a residential power feed.

And “several sheets per day”. Ouch.

If I were seeing a plastic recycling facility on How It’s Made I would expect to see a continuous feed system, with elaborate heat scavenging systems to preheat the ingredients while cooling the product.

I’m not sure how you scale such a thing down to cottage industry scale. Preheating to around 60° could be reasonably done by amateurs but this stuff goes up to at least 350° to melt plastic.

[mchannon]

Am thinking propane tanks.

Working with those temps probably not appropriate for an office environment, but on a porch or well-ventilated garage, should economically outperform 110V pretty well.

[pjc50]

Running the recycling operation off propane is hilarious. That sounds like an easy way to emit far more CO2 than just burning the plastic and making some new plastic out of the propane.

[hinkley]

New Belgium distilling used to take the dregs from their beer batches and ferment them again anaerobically to produce methane they then used to fire some of their boilers.

Then those dregs got composted and used on the landscaping.

There are ways to co-generate fuel for this but I don't want to lose the larger message that PP is producing toy solutions no matter how you zhuzh them up.

Could they get over that in version 5? Probably. But more likely on 6 or 7, and more likely still for another entrepreneur to scoop them and make something real.