Can an Air Fryer Recycle Plastic?

we are on a mission to prove that everyone is completely capable of recycling plastic at home themselves there seems to be a bit of a myth that recycling only really happens behind closed doors in big factories with loads of equipment but it's not really the case it's actually simple enough to do that you can grab something you already have at home to make something useful and fun out of plastic waste and literally anyone can do it so we've been having a little look around online for something secondhand that we think a lot of people might

have and within about 10 minutes we found this little air fryer and we figured it's worth a go we not tried an air fryer before but it sounds like it might work why not let's go get it Matt has done some beautiful haggling I think it was up at how much is that for 25 got it for 20 oh yeah thank you cheers how was it nice and clean beautiful L this obviously has a bunch of holes in the bottom yeah all the plastic is going to fall through in it when we're melting in the

oven we're always using a little tray aren't we yeah so we need something to like put in there don't we so doesn't fall through should we go to a supermarket and go find a tin or a yeah we'll find something yes plumy Toms tole tole plumy Toms feels a bit short do it that was pretty good other one I think that's the best we're going to get not only Burgers economy Burgers nice lunch sorted back to the workshop and uh Burgers then plastic melting beautiful so there we go we've got our air fryer we've got

our melting vessel SL lunch M should hold off on eating lunch for a bit we will eat them don't them get to waste we'll plate them up Chuck them in the fridge and just get this clean and then we'll have our delicious lunch as a little treat right let's give it a go there you [Music] go oh wow oh right so we spent a bit of time getting rid of all the labels and the glue so that tin is now nice and clean so now we've just got to line it with something so that the

plastic doesn't stick to it when it's melting we were thinking of using baking paper but we were on a call with our patrons the other day and one of them very cleverly pointed out that it could easily catch fire so thank you for that tip Catherine so instead we're going to be using these Teflon baking sheets and cutting it to shape so that it sits nicely in the tin it's gone surprisingly well has actually going very well isn't it right so we're going to get the air fryer warmed up but because we don't fully trust

this little St to be exactly accurate we're going to Chuck a thermometer in there as well that'll give us a good indication if the hdp is actually getting to the right temperature see it works so for this we're going to be working with HP so things like milk bottle tops detergent bottles shampoo bottles basically anything with the triangle with the number two in it that's cuz it's got a nice low melting point so it's perfect for this kind of thing so let's drop one in there and see if it works that's exactly how it looks

on the panini press or what's the temperature like where are we it says 170 and on the dial we're on oh 170 okay decent right let's Tru a few more in see how that goes that it's looking great beautiful sweet so that works extremely well I'm very surprised about that but the video has to be a bit more interesting than us buying an air fryer and melting four bottle tops so we're not done no we're not done so we need to make something out of said plastic so in preparation of us being clever enough to

actually make this work we asked our Instagram audience what they think we should make out of the plastic from the air fryer because it's an air fry we thought something for the kitchen uh that can't be anything that touches food just for food safety reasons these are some of the fabulous responses we got chip Clips the things that kind of yeah keep your bag closed that was a really popular choice um I actually think that'd be a really cool product to make might be slightly better suited to injection molding yeah the little sort of plastic

hinge might be tricky to do with a a basic mold we're looking to make for this U again quite a lot of big things we had like kitchen backsplash was quite a cool one spice rack but the only issue with that is that obviously the Airy is quite small and we're going to be quite limited to how much we can fit in it so one of the small uh suggestions that we really liked was this one bottle opener for opening beers or other non-alcoholic drinks with a metal cap so what we did is we went

on Amazon and we found this little device which is a device the bottle opener kit with a little threaded part that you can screw into something and we thought we could probably make a handle of some sort it works really nicely we can just make a fairly simple looking mold shape it a little bit just with a knife and then screw that into place off camera we used a l of scrapwood that we had lying around in our off cut Spin and we made a quick mold this is super chunky because it shrinks a lot

and warps if it's nice and robust that means you can use it over and over again as well yeah we've had some molds we've used like 20 30 times so big chunky mold that should give us a nice kind of chunky handle size obviously oversized then we can shape it and make it look a little bit nice and ergonomic but that should do the job hopefully so one thing we always get asked is how to work out the amount of plastic you need when you've got a new mold the simple way of doing it is

just working out the dimensions of this which is four by we're hoping for a depth of four by 15 so 4 * 4 * 15 is 2 40 and essentially that's the amount of GS of plastic that you need so 240 G you can add sort of 5 or 10% for wastage so it shrinks a bit so add a little bit more yeah we've got about 260 g here so we've got like maybe 10 or 15 G in there not much just from when we tested it and make sure it works now it definitely works

we're going to get all of this in there and get it [Music] melted it is I think like - 2us 3 at the moment o hello get in here nice so one thing that is worth noting is that you want to make sure you're in a nice ventilated space we've got massive High roofs here if you can open windows open your garage doors work outside the other thing we would recommend is that we've obviously gone out and picked up this air fryer specifically for this project don't use your home air fryer mainly because if you

get any plastic stuck in there and then someone wax the temperature all the way up to cook some food then it will burn the plastic and then that becomes carcinogenic so use a dedicated machine they're super cheap secondhand these days and you can get them anywhere it's better than our actual heater it does compress a doesn't it right it's feeling pretty good it is Handy getting a tin that's just a little bit lower than the top of your that was very good that we did do that that was well done it was it was I

felt jealous like I was going to go get the other glove and do it but then do it treat [Applause] yourself so Plastics just heating for hopefully it's final time then we're going to get it in here but you need to add loads of pressure because the plastic shrinks so in order to do that you can use a Vie you can use a press you can use whatever you can to keep it nice and easy and kind of accessible just going to use a couple of clamps Chuck it on the corner of the table like

this clamp on each side and keep pressing it and every couple of minutes we're going to come back and press it a little bit more to counteract that shrinkage here we go let's work quickly okay shape it roughly into a kind of cylindrical blob oh that's good right I need clamping help John I think that's looking good right let's go some lunch so for us turning plastic waste into new things isn't just a fun way of doing our bit for the planet but it's also ni just to learn new things and on the topic of

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Brothers mate to get 25% off an annual subscription big thank you to curiosity stream for supporting our channel that is absolutely enough of these Burgers let's go back to the [Music] plastic so we left the plastic in the mold overnight to cool and then in the morning it popped out really nicely and we could quickly trace on our shape using a paper template that we'd made [Music] [Music] now since this was a fairly chunky blank we decided we would get rid of the bulk of the material with a saw and the nice thing about working

with plastic is that pretty much any woodworking tools will work fine now obviously any sort of shaping is going to create waste so we put a box underneath where we're working and that way we could catch all the shavings and off cuts to be used later on at this point it was still feeling quite chunky so we decided to cut some bigger parts off and this way we got our first look at some of the awesome marble colors of this multicolor plastic at this point we also drilled the slightly undersized hole ready for the bottle

opener to be screwed in later on we did the majority of the shaping with a Spoke shave which helps us to soften all the edges and give it a bit more of a rounded feel [Music] [Music] the less Square this shape became the harder it was to hold so we decided to just screw the bottle opener in and then clamp that in our super Jaws [Music] as we got closer to the final shape we did start to expose a couple of air bubbles but since the whole thing felt a little bit too big we just

decided to trim it down and that sorted out the hole at the bottom but for the hole at the top we just decided to fill it so we used a mini heat gun to heat the plastic up and then melted some off Cuts in our air fryer again and then squish them together once they were both [Music] hot and once that was filled and trimmed we continue with the final shaping until we got the look and feel of what we were going [Music] for [Music] now we always try to avoid sanding plastic as the fine

particles tend to go everywhere they're really hard to collect and even harder to reuse so we just used a card scraper to take off the last of the sore [Music] marks all of the waist caught in that bucket underneath gets collected up ready for a future project and as a very final but optional step we decided to give the handle a quick buff on our friction polishing mop which helps to give it a little bit of a [Music] [Music] shine so the question we set out to try and answer in this video was can you

use everyday household items to recycle plastic in this case an air fryer and the answer big drum roll please yes you can yeah you can definitely surprised I don't want there a drum roll for that they just watched us do it successfully so yeah basically it works really well it sits we're talking about this and I think it sits somewhere between a panini press and an oven because it doesn't have the direct heat of panini press it's a little bit slower but where it's a much smaller cavity it's much smaller space than an oven it

does heat up a lot quicker so yeah faster than an oven a little bit slower than the penini breast and if you got a bigger air fryer like we obviously just picked up a small one to test it out but if you had a bigger you get these giant like two draw have a whole chicken in their air fries can't you if you got one of them you could do a pretty good pretty good amount of plastic sure in terms of the bottle opener itself would' you reckon to be fair Matt did all the shaping

so I'll let you do this thanks well yeah we went for this kind of slightly taper design just to try and make it a bit kind of ergonomic nice to feel it was a bit longer initially and it felt a bit bulky didn't it so we uh Slim down the colors I think look really cool like we just went for multicolored we very rarely do multicolored we usually go for like quite specific color Blends two or three colors but that actually looks I think it's pretty interesting yeah it's fun if nothing else I think a

bottle open it really is a very good sort of entry level project to be people to do trying out recycling plastic for the first time those of you that have seen any of our previous videos may remember the video where we made recycle plastic pens we actually took some of those pen blanks and turned it into a second bottle opener to do a comparison show the comparison so if we were going to make these at scale this is how we do it and I actually think it's quite a nice little product so if you did

fancy one just let us know we can pop a few on our online shop lovely another thing that we are extremely excited about is recently well recently for like 3 months we've been working on these little cartoon characters oh the patreon patreon characters so again there's no pressure at all to sign patreon but we do ask that you go and check out these little cartoons we' been working on because they're extremely cool they're very cool they're all based on us because we're that vein but there's three levels there's Eco Warrior Eco hero and Eco Legend

yeah all all varying different degree we just look really epic as little cartoon Vikings basically I think the Eco Warrior is the most accurate version of us but as you level up you can get us we turn to these like badass Wizards and barbarians wizard sure we've actually had our first ever Eco Legend So a huge shout out goes to Jessica GRE thank you so much Jessica Legend absolute Eco Legend and an absolute massive shout out goes to the rest of the Brotherhood over there they're all amazing in keeping us doing what we do keeping

the lights on in the workshop and Rec more plastic keeping Smiles on these little faces well thank you so much for watching the video and thank you to curiosity stream for sponsoring the video yeah big than a really cool platform so check it out should we grab a beer with our new bottle open I about gra another burger oh no God we felt sick for so long I'm still sick now see you later bye cheers what's up