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.-- xenzag, May 26 2012 mangle http://www.kingswoo...k/images/Mangle.jpgwooden roller prototype [xenzag, May 26 2012] Magnetic Can Squishing Magnetic_20can_20squishingPossibly more fun [csea, May 26 2012] this guy made a can crusher... http://www.youtube....QKw&feature=related [xandram, May 26 2012] 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.-- AusCan531, May 26 2012 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.-- xenzag, May 26 2012 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?
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.-- MaxwellBuchanan, May 26 2012 [+] at Starbucks we used the steam wand to heat up milk bottles before we crushed them. It worked very well.-- DIYMatt, May 26 2012 [linl] to related idea for conductive containers.-- csea, May 26 2012 So, a laundry roller, then?-- RayfordSteele, May 26 2012 If all the empty bottles were first filled with loosefill packing chips and then mangled, this would be better.-- Phrontistery, May 26 2012 True, but buying all those packing chips would be a drain.-- MaxwellBuchanan, May 26 2012 LOL, indeed!-- Phrontistery, May 26 2012 They are much harder to crush than plastic bottles.-- pocmloc, May 26 2012 random, halfbakery