Butte Metz

update 2025

A lot has happened in the last year.

We had a investor group show up.  I did a ton of improvment to the shop in anticipation of production expansions.  Then the investor group dissappeared, and I was cash poor for many months.

Finally worked out of that tight spot,   the cash and receivables are ahead of debts and bills finally.

Shop was upgraded with a big 5hp industrial vacuum, cyclone filter to suck the shred plastic from the new but used diesel shredder.  That shredder was not made by me, and it is a fix and repair daily kind of thing.  I recycle the engine exhaust to blow directly into the shredder which along with the big blower dries the plastic much better.  It took awhile to figure the right adjustment of the valves etc to get it to dry right.  dryer plastic means less steam bubbles and foaming.  

I had a process engineer from Schaeffler Germany show up for a couple weeks volunteer, and he worked thru many varations of the process.  ratio of hard plastics to soft, and temperatures.  

Then a month later I was doing a convention and met a engineer from Mitsui Chemical.  He gave me a education in plastic additives.  Which then gave me questions to add to Grok and research even more.  I lack the commercial additives, but I found some studies showing that using palm oil, used motor oil, and coconut oil in the plastic will lubricate the plastic thru the machine lower the melt point and make it mix better.  I am now getting a much improved board and as a bonus the foaming is nearly gone.  I am suspecting that some of the foaming of the plastic was cavitation, and not just from steam.  Palm oil seems to be the best, as it is thinner than motor oil.  I do add in a bit of the motor oil to extend the palm oil as the motor oil is free and palm oil comes as 4 liter bottles for roughly 7.50usd.

I also found that when I add oil to the plastic at 1.5 percent by weight, I can add pigment powder ans thge powder will stick to the plastic.  

At the moment I have two guys mixing the recipe in a cement mixer, and filling all the plastic barrels I have in order to do a production run.  I hired a third man to do nothing but mix plastic once I get a suffecient buffer for the other 2 guys to make lumber.  

I have to make 1700+ boards that are approx 1x2 inch x 4 feet long.  It takes about 3 and half min per board, but the boys are very slow at mold changing.  I may need to replace them.  They waste a lot of time listening to music.

I also designed a much bigger plastic shredder, of which I have built 3 units to date.  unit number 4 has improvments based on assembly of the first three, that is sold already.

I also revised my design of plastic extrusion machine.  It is more compact, and user friendly.  

With the bigger machines I make now, I needed a forklift.  So I traded a couple tons of fence posts for a 90's era Komatsu 2 ton forklift.  It has a gas engine in it.  It is always needing repairs to the carb as it sat for a long time.  

I also have upgraded the safety of the shop with upgrade air ventelation.  However despite the fact that I make almost no fumes, my neighbor constantly complains to the city.  Any excuse to complain real or imaginary he and his sister do.  Last week the DENR showed up.  But the smell was not me.  Some squatters in the area were burning plastic off some wiring insulation.  I had not even ran the machine all week when they inspected.  I was closed when the first time the inspectors showed up, so it was obvious that It was not me.  Even still this guy just keeps making the rounds of various gov agencies.

Simultaniously, I do projects for all sorts of gov agencies here, including the DENR, so it is a bit ironic tha this guy keeps messing with me.

It haas been awhile since I posted.

Updates:

Making plastic fence posts.  2 inch and 3 inch diameter from waste bubble wrap plastic.

Companies are giving me tons of the plastic every month.

Downside is now I am lagging behind in shredding and processing it to feed in the machine.

Plastic agglomeration aka making the light weight film plastic into more dense granules that feed into the machine has become a challenge.  

I need a conveyor belt in the worst way to bag the stuff up.

building more extrusion machines this month and some plastic agglomeration experiments.  

I bought a feed pellet mill for the plastic.  it is not working so great on plastic to pelletize it.  It works some days, some days no.

I built a 10hp extrusion machine for the shop.  If I feed it plastic pellet made from recycled plastic, I can get about a half metric ton per shift with 2 men working.  it will use about 110kwh for the shift.    Local power rates come out to 23 usd for the power for a day of processing.  or roughly 2 cents usd per pound to melt it and pump it in the mold.  

Shredded plastic it just depends on the plastic type, how well it feeds in the extrusion machine.  I ran shredded shampoo bottles all day and it was the same as the pellets.  I also have run shredded foil snack food packaging and it ran half that per hour and the food residue cooked off in the plastic.  It still make a okay fence post but it did not smell nice and was a little bit sticky.   the smell and stickiness went away after a couple weeks of being outdoors.  

Well a lot has happened in a year.

I have built a bunch of factories allover the Philippines.

Building a bigger 10hp extrusion machine that pumps out 40kilos of plastic per hour and runs on 220v at 63 amps single phase.  So far 3 are in operation, a fourth is in the shop with some wiring and its ready.  

Also working on recycling the low value plastics like films, bags, sachets etc.  The kind of stuff that no one else will take.

Moved into a new shop space.  about 3x bigger than before with room for big trucks to come in.  

Up to 6 employees now.  

Plastic recycling is getting to be a livliehood.

So many people asked me to build a wood chipper in addition t o my plastic shredders.  

After a ton of research, which involved watching every video on the things I could find, along with buying blueprints for different designs, I came up with this:

I rolled a piece of 4 inch wide 1/4 inch thick flat bar to 18.5 inch inside diameter.  

Then I fabbed the side plates from 1/8 inch diamond plate steel.

built the frame from 2x3 steel C channel beams,  6 inch wheels and powered by a 7hp liquid cooled diesel.

The secret sauce is a 18 inch Deere mower blade.  

So basically most wood chippers are not much more than a lawn mower turned sideways, or the bigger units have a sort of mandolin veggie chopper blade and some lawn mower blades turning and then the whole mess is tossed out of the machine with a centrifugal blower.

This unit only has the blade as it blows the air just fine, but bigger units really need the blower.  

I have run it for an hour, chipping various things up to 3 inch branches.  It only bogs down on really wet green stuff.  

Diesel engine starts like a model T with a crank, and has a decompression lever to spin up the motor by hand before pulling the crank and letting it fire up.  I also put urethane motor mounts on the motor so it does not vibrate itself to death.  I wish I knew about these mounts years ago.  

So it has been awhile since I last posted.  Made a lot of lumber since.  Getting a lot better at it.  This week I finally set up a proper production line with work stations.   It has the extrusion line that fills the molds, a cooling tank to cool the full  molds, then the cooled lumber is punched out of the mold with a hammer and rod.  There is a special rack to hold the mold in place for that.  Then the lumber is taken to the trimming station where the ends are trimmed up to length.  The trimming station is not quite where I want it to be, it needs an adjustable stopper added so I get the perfect 2, 4 or 6 foot board cut.  Then the still slightly soft warm board is set in the storage rack, fully supported and held so it does not warp as it cools overnight.  After that it is strapping the bundles together and ready for the customer.  

We have made a LOT of planters and sand boxes.  Current production is fencing materials.  

The whole systems eventually fails to function as a series of its components fail, rather than as a consequence of the failure of any specific components by themselves.

I have not seen much mention of this except oblique mentions here.

It is called the failure cascade.  

In robust systems, you can lose a lot of things before a failure happens. In your food system, if you do it wrong, and not even 'wrong' just not accounting for failure, your failure is a straight line.  

That old chestnut saying for the want of a nail the war was lost.  

This is because there was not a robust system in place to account for that.  

Yes people say one is zero and 2 is one.  But it fails to really clarify exactly the deeper meanings of the failure cascade.  

As a recent personal example:

I had a typhoon hit my house.  I have solar power as the backup and it can provide about 75% of my overall power needs if I manage it right.  However on the day of the typhoon, I am home.  Strike one.
I am using power as I am home.  Using the PC, and cooking in the instapot.   The shore power went out.  So my system, went to battery.  Cloudy weather, my system was only making a few watts of power.    It was quite dark.  But since I had no alarm that notified me of the shore power going out, I ran down the battery to a very low level, once I realized that the shore power was out.    Now I was still with lights, because I have a separate backup battery system of lights using those outdoor solar flood lights.  Except the panel is outside and the floodlight is indoors.  So my failure cascade was stopped because I still had light, and gas stove.

But this was only because I had a robust system.  I have since installed an alarm that sounds when the shore power is out.  Even still I was one step away from being in the dark except for a cell phone light.  

This is only a example.  Bigger systems are more prone to failure because vertical integration is more efficient, yet less robust.  Power, fuel, food, all these systems are being deliberately chipped away now.  So while a few system failures does not a societal collapse make, a cascade of failures on the other hand brings it all down.  

It is not the thing that you think will fail that brings everything down.  It is the cascade of small things that brings it down.

this applies to personal finance, on the small scale to entire societies on the big scale.

My little hand wood planer was not up to the task, so I outsourced a batch to a wood working shop and it was bout 2 bucks a board to run thru a commercial planer.  I do not have enough budget yet to buy one of those.

Here is the results.

90% HDPE recycled pellets and 10% shredded PP used microwave food containers.  the PP plastic thins out the HDPE as I am using a blow mold grade that is quite thick and gummy.

Rus Williams wrote:https://preciousplastic.com/en/machines/

Here's a video. While I recognise that plastic for many falls under the heading of toxic gick, it's also true that plastic is incredibly useful, and that this effort has many permaculture halmarks. Turning the problem into a solution, waste is an unused resource, small and local solutions. It's also totally open source with blueprints, this is a mature and realistic project that anyone with a modicum of skills could make happen.

I know I've posted this before, but I really like what this guy is doing.

Found Daves videos almost 5 years ago now.  Followed the videos, built a shop from scratch and it provides a living.  Not getting rich by any stretch of imagination, but not hungry either.  

K Eilander wrote:

Cécile Stelzer Johnson wrote:I would like to build a machine that turns plastic waste into small chips. I could then sit at my local transfer station and pick the garbage to chip it. While the extrusion machine is above my ability to build at present, I'd love to resell these chips for such construction. If nothing else, it would save a lot of money for my town by seriously compacting the trash they have to deal with. Are there any better designs out there? How closely should the various plastics be sorted or commingled?

Most of the shredder designs I've seen use lots of lazer or plasma cut blades, which makes them a little hard for the average person to construct.

Sorry to break it to you, but there is no 'low' cost way to make plastic flake.  Best I was able to do is 150 bucks in laser cut parts and a 300 dollar hoist motor + machining, bearings, chain flex coupler, a length of 1 inch tubing, hex bar, and sheet metal hopper.    Which after all that I sell locally in the Philippines for 890usd.  No I will not ship overseas, not here to sell product.  

If you looking at setting up at the transfer station, you gonna need some horsepower and equipment.  think complexity and expense of a small rock crushing plant.  They will literally provide you with a mountain of plastic, and you will need to process it in truckloads at a time.  The little precious plastic machine I described above will get you a couple pounds for your molder, but that is it.  20 min before you need to let the motor rest or it will over heat.  

My big shredders start at 5hp and go up to 18hp.  Even there you will be hard pressed to process truckloads.  It took 2 days for my guys to process 800 kilos of preshredded PP food containers with a 5hp machine.  

But no fear, I started in a 1 car garage with some hand tools, and knowledge of where to get stuff made.   I got 5 people in the shop as of this month.  I literally had bout 100 bucks to start out with.  I just started building machines for others, and earned enough to build some for myself.   If I can do it on a third world tropical island, you can too.