h a l f b a k e r y"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
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Most (all?) plastic bottles can be recyled, but they are bulky items especially the large 2 litre ones. I twist them up to make them smaller, but there is an opportunity here for the creation of a new labour saving device in the form of a Bottle Mangle.
It's a simple piece of apparatus, consisting
of two powered rollers, which heat up on activation. Bottles fed between their slowly rotating surfaces are squashed flat, and stay flat. Two corresponding textures areas of each roller ensures that the plastic bottles are gripped properly on being pressed against the feeding edge.
mangle
http://www.kingswoo...k/images/Mangle.jpg
wooden roller prototype [xenzag, May 26 2012]
Magnetic Can Squishing
Magnetic_20can_20squishing
Possibly more fun [csea, May 26 2012]
this guy made a can crusher...
http://www.youtube....QKw&feature=related
[xandram, May 26 2012]
[link]
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If you don't want to build a heated one, just use your
mangle to squish the bottles from the bottom up and when
all the air is forced out, screw the lid back on. |
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Ah yes- thought of that, but the threaded collar never accepts the top after any substantial flattening. I curls up into a sort of 3D ellipse. |
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Thing is, how many bottles do you have to mangle to
save enough resources (reduced space in shipping)
to repay the resource cost of the mangle? |
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It might work if incorporated into a public bottle
bank. But then I, for one, would be very tempted to
see what could actually be put through the mangle. |
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[+] at Starbucks we used the steam wand to heat up milk bottles before we crushed them. It worked very well. |
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[linl] to related idea for conductive containers. |
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So, a laundry roller, then? |
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If all the empty bottles were first filled with loosefill
packing chips and then mangled, this would be
better. |
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True, but buying all those packing chips would be a
drain. |
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They are much harder to crush than plastic bottles. |
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