All machines Plastics and Recycling
Plastics and Recycling
Molding, extrusion, shredding and the sorting lines that make recycling possible.
Want the mechanism, not just the footage?
We wrote a full explainer for this category: High-Speed Injection Molding. What the machine does, how it works, the numbers that matter and who buys one.
9 films
-
1:21 Plastics and Recycling96 bottle caps molded in under two seconds
Ninety-six bottle caps, complete, in under 1.9 seconds. The mold opens, the parts are swept clear and the machine is closing again before you have registered the shot. High-speed injection molding of this type fills the mold in well under a tenth of a second, and the whole line runs day and night on that cycle.
-
9:43 Plastics and RecyclingHow six million pounds of electronic waste get recycled a month
Six million pounds of electronics a month go in as phones, servers and screens and come out as sorted streams of copper, aluminum, steel and precious metal concentrate. Shredders, magnets, eddy current separators and optical sorters do the whole job. Business Insider films the plant properly rather than in a highlight reel.
-
5:01 Plastics and RecyclingExtrusion blow molding, explained by the machine builder
Extrusion blow molding drops a hot tube of plastic, closes a mold around it and inflates it into a bottle, all in a few seconds. Bekum explains the parison control that decides where the wall is thick and where it is thin. Every jug of milk and every jerry can you own started this way.
-
2:13 Plastics and RecyclingA single shaft shredder eating whole tires
A single-shaft shredder working through a pile of scrap tires, hydraulic ram forcing material into the rotor while the cutting table sizes the output. Everything about the machine is designed around the fact that steel-belted rubber destroys most equipment. It just keeps going.
-
1:57 Plastics and RecyclingTurning scrap tires into fuel for a cement kiln
A shredder eating whole truck tires, steel belts included, and spitting out chip that goes straight into a cement kiln as fuel. The rotor does not slow down for the steel. Tire shredding is one of the most brutally impressive things a machine can do on camera.
-
1:39 Plastics and RecyclingA five layer blown film line
Molten polymer is extruded as a tube, inflated into a bubble several storeys tall, cooled by air and collapsed into film. This line does it in five layers at once, each layer doing a different job. The bubble is the most beautiful thing in the plastics industry and it is genuinely load bearing.
-
1:29 Plastics and RecyclingHow an optical sorter splits a recycling stream
An animation showing how near infrared sensors identify plastic types by their molecular signature as they fly past on a belt, then air jets fire to knock the right pieces off the stream. Modern sorters do this on thousands of items a minute. Recycling only works at all because of machines like this.
-
1:22 Plastics and RecyclingA water quenched blown film line
Water quenching instead of air cooling produces film with completely different optical and mechanical properties, and the bubble runs downward into a water ring rather than up a tower. It is an unusual process and rarely filmed. Eighty seconds that will be new to almost everyone who works in plastics.
-
1:17 Plastics and RecyclingIn-mold labeling in under two seconds
In-mold labelling puts the label into the tool before the plastic arrives, so the container comes out already decorated with no second operation. Here it happens in under 1.8 seconds a cycle. A robot places the labels and takes the parts out in the same motion, which is the part that seems impossible.