Dry Glass Recycling

Anyone know of anyone that repurposes old glass. Every boat shop I've ever been to has rolls of woven roving that they don't use because they are using newer knit fabrics. I'm just wondering why not collect all of that and turn it into milled fibers or some type of mat. Additionally, every shop also has a scrap bin of odd shapes that don't get used that could go to the same fate. I feel like most guys would trade 100lbs or scrap for 10lbs of quality material. Or mix it with Polyester and make GPO-3 board. Or mix it with a foam PVC for backing plates. Anything would be better than collecting dust.

 

The logistics of making it happen don't work out.

And there's not enough out there to bother with.

 

Perhaps you should start a business doing that and report on your progress.

 

I am building one boat. The wastes are astronomical.

Today, I was building up corecell stock from scraps. The stuff is about $3.00 per sqft to buy. I have like 1-200 sqft of offcuts.

A recycling means for core and glass waste would be good, but I spent about 30 minutes making 4 square feet of core from offcuts with chopsaw, table saw and raptor stapler. At $12 for 30 minutes work, I can tolerate the low value return. At the end of my job a new sheet of core or two would cost me $500 to ship here, so I am trying to avoid that cost.

But I have chucked a lot of glass offcuts and paid for two gallons of milled glass.

I wish there was a mini hammer mill for boat builders where would could chuck small offcuts of core or glass and get the grindings, but the cap cost of such a creature is too high.

 

Agreed that is why I was thinking of a mobile service. A guy in a van would come out to you with the machine in the truck and process your glass for you.

 

And he wouldn't make enough to pay for his vehicle, gas, insurance, let alone a salary.

The only way this type of recycling works is fee based state mandated yuk. You are required to recycle. He comes to your site and gets the materials and a check. Costs are offset to customer across the industry. China makes boats amd landfills it all or dumps in the ocean.

 

A state-based mandate is one possibility. But I won't believe it is the only one. There are a lot of wealthy people that want to protect the environment and are will to donate money to do so.

This is your creature. Particle mill can process recycled glass fiber - Materials Today

Here is an idea... It's a raffle. 100lbs of dry fabric gets you 1 raffle ticket or you can buy them $100 apiece. All the fabric is used as a support fiber for a concrete artificial reef. The winner gets the GPS coordinates.

 

Jump on it, buy the machine and get on the road.

I have 10 pounds of old glass, I'll send you my address.

I'm not trying to be an ***.

There's no market for the current assortment of recycled materials. Yes many can be recycled, but the cost can be higher in $$$ and pollution in collecting, transporting, reprocessing, then finding a market that will pay more for recycled material.

Requiring by law to recycle a particular material is about the only way to make it happen right now.

 

And generally the environmental cost of the process is higher than not recycling it.

 

Not sure I agree.

Today's landfills, despite all efforts, are probably tomorrow's hazardous waste sites. Things like paper and fiberglass will never break down in anaerobic environments.

The problem is always scale. You can't make 10 pounds of fiberglass into a usable much of anything. Hauling it lands on your statement. The great fiberglass recycling plant in Kansas (not real) would cost a lot for that guy in Washington to send to...

If every home had a small hammer mill or device to grind up paper or plastic or -fiberglass-; perhaps some economies could be realized.

Or, we could send all our waste to the factory. And Heston could say, Soylent Green is plastic and fiberglass!

 

A small hammer or ball mill for home is not a problem, you can buy them online or make your own. For making shredded fiberglass you can use a big food processor. You just have to sharpen the knives more often, or make a custom knife of something more tough. Chopper guns use one and they seem to do just fine.

 

The environment cost of these things starts in storage, which has a small cost, chiefly in space, time and containers. But then transportation, cleaning and sorting, then milling, then storing and transporting again.

And unless angels pull these mills or grinders out of their bums, making, storing, transporting, selling, operating and eventually recovering and recycling those mills has a much much higher environmental cost than just putting the glass in a landfill.

 

I have a small hammer mill, it takes a long time with a great deal of effort to process even a small amount of anything.

 

I have a lot of corecell M offcuts.

I ended up throwing them away a couple years ago for floor space, but would have been cool to grind them to powder. I did some for rebates. Mixed with epoxy, they make a hard, temperature/heat resistant filler that you can bulk much thicker without catching fire.

I take the offcuts at the end now and I am ripping them to the nearest inch, then building to need. Anything under an inch could go to grinding if I had a safe means. Food processor? Hmm. Seems heavy on time.

A piece of corecell M, 32 sqft is about $400 shipped to my house with freight. Two are about $550, or call it $5-10 per sqft!

Here is a 'recyling' picture. Raptor staples hold the shape.

I built this wall section and the one behind it from scraps. 7' high and 3.5" total length or about 25 sqft. Yes. It butts to a short plywood wall. Don't ask.

 

I thought about this a long time ago and ended up, I like to say "inventing" "forged" Carbon fiber. several years ago I repaired a pressure bulkhead on an airplane that was damaged by an O2 bottle blowing the valve off due to overpressurization. the Airplane was as the industry calls it "experimental". this is in short and very basic among many other things a money saving loop hole that allowed you to use non certified parts, including the carbon fiber that I used for the repair. the repair area was only about 5 inches or so and I ended up using maybe 1/2 yard. lucky for me the min order of this carbon was 10 yards. being that we 99.999% of the time worked certified airplanes the carbon fiber was useless to my company and so i was allowed to keep the remaining carbon. I made all kinds of pointless things with it and saved the off cuts. I was working on a project and had to fill a large hole and I didnt have any milled fibers so I cut (by hand) the carbon scrapes into 1/4 to 1/2 inch pieces, mixed it with epoxy and plugged the holes. it looked absolutely fantastic. Most people I showed it to were grossed out by it but a few loved the looks as much as i did. fast forward a few years and a major golf club manufacture started building clubs with chopped carbon and then the supercar manufacturers started building non structural parts with it. Its a complete scam because they're using scrapes and charging more than they would if it was a traditional weave cloth. either way i've started capitalizing (not much) on it by making a few things here and there to sell. i've made sheets of it for people to do as they please, most recently automotive sill plates for M3's. although the plates I screwed up on by painting the M stripes the wrong way I've decided to keep on my car.

chopping the carbon by hand for the sheet that i made and attached here to about an hour or longer to chop, broke a pair of scissors and had to sharpen the other maybe 3 times and I had bloody blisters on my cutting hand that lasted for about a week.

that being said if you could get scrap carbon from someplace then I could see doing something with it but fibre glast already sells milled carbon and is pretty reasonable priced as well as milled glass. so after your time and money into equipment, i'm not sure there would be any meat left on the bone for you.

but finding something to produce and sell with the scapes could be an idea. something small and not complex, something that you could build a few molds for and knock out a few products per day at your leisure, ya know make a little "going to town" money. I dont have any ideas but im sure something could be done with it.