Innovations that Repurpose Plastic and Glass Waste

People are realizing that filling a landfill with plastic, metal and glass waste indefinitely is unsustainable. In the past decade or two Countries, Cities and households have been shifting their behaviors to divert waste away from a long life of deterioration, and towards useful secondary purposes. The recycling systems across the U.S. collect these materials to repurpose plastic, glass and aluminum containers, rather than have them sit in a landfill and leach harmful chemicals into the ground.

Although the economics of reintroducing those materials back into supply chains has yet to reach an ideal scheme, we’ve realized that reusing materials beyond their short useful life is common sense. Grocery store collection machines and home pick-ups of recyclables have done a decent job at redirecting these materials back into supply chains to maintain their value and reduce the demand for further resource extraction.

This method of repurposing or “upcycling” materials to be used for another purpose has been around practically forever. For some reason our modern industrial systems don’t efficiently utilize the complete life-cycle of repurposed materials. Instead we throw them and allow them to take decades to deteriorate in the landfill while we harvest more resources from the Earth. Well thanks to human ingenuity people have invented devices to more quickly repurpose everyday beverage containers into reusable materials.

Here are two ingenious devices that are enabling people to divert plastic and glass bottles into a new useful material.

This simple device enables people to strip plastic bottles down to a plastic string. I’m sure with some creativity we in the U.S. could come up with a variety of applications for the string. But in third world countries or other struggling or impoverish regions I could imagine a durable binding material being very useful. In areas like India where there is tremendous plastic pollution this simply assembled device would be a welcomed tool. People could collect plastic bottles from their streets and waterways and convert them into binding string that can be used for a number of uses. This social innovation would solve multiple problems, removing plastic bottles from the environment, and producing free — and probably abundant — plastic string that can be used for a wide variety of applications. We should be producing more of these devices and distributing them as a component of humanitarian aide in areas with immense plastic pollution. These simple metal tools would empower people by equipping them with a device that encourages them to clean up plastic pollution while they gain a useful ream of binding.

This more industrial device is much more than a simple tool. This device eats glass bottles and turns them into sand. That’s right. Now I’m not sure the comfort factor of this glass sourced sand and how comparable it is to regular beach sand. But regardless sand has a lot of uses. Sand is in very high demand in the construction industry where its used in various building materials like cement and plaster. If we were able to design a centralized collection system that transported the crushed bottles to these massive glass converters we could then have that cheap glass-sand sold cheaply to the construction manufacturing industry. Not only would it be a great way to reduce glass waste, but allow for cheaper building products. Or these devices could be distributed to areas where there is a high volume of glass consumption, say near a downtown area or strip of bars that go through a tremendous amount of glass bottles whether they be Corona, Bud Light or anything else. We just have to design smart, closed-loop systems to harvest and repurpose these discarded resources.

We have the sustainable solutions that can not only remedy pollution problems, but retain its value. These integrated solutions should be studied, promoted, invested in and deployed wherever possible across the globe. Deploying these innovations can make an enormous impact on the health and living standards of people in polluted and impoverished areas giving them a reason to clean up plastic and glass, while providing them useful materials afterward. The innovations are here, we just need to amplify and deploy these solutions.