Name: How to Make a Bowl from Recycled Plastic | Beginners HDPE Project @BrothersMake
Uploaded: 2024-10-17T08:17:00-05:00
Duration: 8 min 17 s
Description: How to Make a Bowl from Recycled Plastic | Beginners HDPE Project

How to Make a Bowl from Recycled Plastic | Beginners HDPE Project

Brothers Make 2024-10-17 | How to Make a Bowl from Recycled Plastic | Beginners HDPE Project

How Africas Smallest Country is Fighting Plastic Pollution

Brothers Make 2024-06-07 | Want to restore the planet's ecosystems and see your impact in monthly videos? The first 200 people to join Planet Wild with our code BROTHERSMAKE5 will get the first month for free at planetwild.com/r/brothersmake/join. If you want to get to know them better first, check out their latest video: Transforming power lines into thriving ecosystems planetwild.com/r/brothersmake/m15. Supporting our sponsors helps keep us in the workshop and saving more plastic from becoming pollution 🤙🏽

We recently spent some time in The Gambia where we helped set up a brand-new recycling workspace with shredding, injection moulding and extrusion capabilities. Part of our job was to find out how the citizens of The Gambia deal with their plastic waste and provide some solutions so that it can be turned into new and meaningful items instead of damaging the environment.

Find out more about the workspace: preciousplasticgambia.com
Machines and moulds: https://www.sustainabledesign.studio/

#PlasticPollution #PlasticRecycling #ClimateCrisis #BrothersMake #RecycledPlastic #RecycledPlasticBottles #PlasticShredding #InjectionMoulding #PlasticExtrusion

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Get started recycling by checking out our EQUIPMENT links:
https://amzn.eu/6VlmURY

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FAQ:
➡️ We sell 100% plastic products on our website! brothersmake.com/shop
➡️ We don't buy any of our plastic. It all comes from collection and donations. We have a video all about it: bit.ly/2RsbhKA
➡️ Our workshop is powered 100% by renewable energy. We don’t use any energy from fossil fuels whatsoever.

♻️♻️♻️

Music by Epidemic Sound

Melting Plastic to make a Comb 🪮

Brothers Make 2024-06-03 | How to make a SUPER simple, recycled plastic comb.

Before we were able to make products at scale with our injection moulding machines, we would just use our good old DIY method to make things out of recycled plastic. Here you can see how we made our first comb prototype, and all you need is a panini press and a few basic tools.

This method can be applied to a whole bunch of different things - just draw up a template or search for one online and get to cutting! Just be sure to collect up all of those shavings so that they can be melted down and used again in future projects. ♻️

#plasticrecycling #diycomb #beautyfromwaste

Randomising new colour combos for our recycled buttons 🎨

Brothers Make 2024-05-27 | Making recycled plastic buttons, but this time we're letting fate choose the colour combo. 🔮

#recycledplastic #ecocraft #sustainablefashion #buttons

Making a box out of melted plastic waste 📦💜

Brothers Make 2024-05-24 | We wanted to find a way to make a recycled plastic box without using any screws or fixings, so we tried our hand at 'plastic welding'. This was very much a first for us, but we think the final product came out really nicely. It's super sturdy and we love the colour combo.

Is there anything else you think we could use plastic welding for? 📦

#diyrecycling #ecocraft #recycledplastic #sustainablediy

Recycling Blu-ray Cases into Sunglasses 🕶️

Brothers Make 2024-05-13 | After collecting thousands of DVD cases and trying to work out what to do with them, we decided that sunglasses would be an awesome sustainable and high-quality product. It took us 10 months to finally get there, and they are certainly the most difficult product to make, but we must say, we are very proud of our Loops. 🕶️

They're available here if you're interested: brothersmake.com/shop/p/loopsblue

#sunglasses #ecofashion #greenerliving #sustainabledesign

Trust the Process…

Brothers Make 2024-05-09 | We wanted to have a go at making our own moulds for injection moulding, so we thought we'd test this by trying to make some simple book page holders. We used our beasty little Wazer water jet cutter to make the middle plate and then bolted this up in between two of our sandwich mould plates. Then once injected, all we had to do was drill the thumb hole, add a little round over and we were done! 📖

#trashtotreasure #waterjetcutting #injectionmoulding #plasticrecycling

How to Make a Recycled Plastic Cutting Board 🥒

Brothers Make 2024-04-29 | DIY chopping board made from 100% recycled HDPE plastic! We've included a lot of information on plastic safety in the description of the full video which is linked below. 🔪

#choppingboard #diyrecycling #easydiy #sustainabledesign #wasteplastic

Melting Bottle Tops into Guitar Picks 🎸

Brothers Make 2024-04-25 | Ever found yourself shredding along to your favourite Metallica song but stopped to think ‘perhaps I could be playing some tasty licks while also saving the planet’. Well fear not, because now you can - here's how to make recycled guitar picks.

First, you need to make thin sheets of recycled plastic, for this we use our t-shirt press, but a panini press would work well too. Then these nifty little hand-operated guitar pick cutters work perfectly to create custom coloured, 100% recycled plastic plectrums. These are super easy to make once you've made the HDPE sheets, however, if you'd prefer to buy some of our guitar picks, then head on over to brothersmake.com/shop 🎸

#guitarpick #recycledplastic #ecodiy #plectrum #sustainablesolutions

Making Sunglasses out of Recycled Plastic 🕶️

Brothers Make 2024-04-22 | Introducing our brand new, Earth Day Loops. 🌍

Crafted with the planet in mind, these frames are handmade from 100% recycled, blue, white and green plastic to resemble this beautiful planet of ours. We’ve also ditched any delicate and complicated hinges on the arms and swapped these out for a single screw to make them as durable as possible.

Polarised lenses? Of course. They also come complete with a fold-flat cork case that has been individually engraved with an added little planet as well as a cleaning cloth.

We've made a very limited run of these, so once they're gone, they're gone! They're available now on our website at brothersmake.com/shop if you fancy checking them out 😎

#ecosunglasses #loops #earthday #sustainablefashion #ecofashion #beautyfromwaste

Melting Waste Plastic to Make a New Sign 🌎

Brothers Make 2024-04-18 | With Earth Day coming up, we thought we'd share one of our more planet-related builds. We wanted to try our hand at signmaking, so we came up with the idea of a two-colour sign, where we would engrave into the first layer to reveal the second. Once we had our sheets fully melted and bonded together, we then used our Stepcraft D840 to CNC our planet earth sign design out.

What do you think of the finished product? Using recycled plastic for this works incredibly well, and it uses up a lot of waste material in one go. There’s definitely potential here for more projects using this same technique. If you have any ideas you’d like us to try, drop a suggestion below 🤙🏽

#earthday #recycledplasticwaste #signmaking #sustainablesolutions

We Recycled Plastic with the Malaysian Government 🇲🇾

Brothers Make 2024-04-15 | Last month, we visited Malaysia to work alongside the Malaysian Humanitarian Foundation to help come up with ways to tackle plastic waste issues. It involved us setting up a recycling workspace, meeting with the government to demo how small-scale recycling works, and helping plan their huge World Cleanup Day event. Here's a little overview of the visit!

For any of you who are signed up to our Patreon, we have uploaded a full video of the trip if you want to check it out: patreon.com/brothersmake

#worldcleanupday #malaysia #plasticrecycling #stopsingleuseplastic

From Landfill to Luxury 💰

Brothers Make 2024-04-11 | We found a discarded wooden side table next to a skip outside our workshop. Instead of letting it go to waste, we thought we'd try our hand at upcycling it by giving it a bit of a makeover. We refinished the outside of the table and added a brand-new top made from 100% recycled plastic. Since we were feeling fancy, we also added wireless phone charging functionality. We are pretty confident that this little table would fit nicely inside a modern home. We literally turned trash into treasure! 👆

#trashtotreasure #upcycling #sustainabledesign #diywirelesscharging #diysidetable

Making a Knife Handle out of Recycled Plastic 🔪

Brothers Make 2024-04-08 | We turned recycled plastic HDPE bottles into a set of knife scales for this beautiful chef’s knife from @BespokeBlokeDesigns 🔪

We made a custom knife scale plywood mould for this and then ripped the blank in half to give us a matching pair. Then, we chose to use Corby fasteners to attach the scales to the tang of the knife, because HDPE doesn’t work very well with glue.

This was a really fun build and we absolutely LOVE the end result. Definitely going to be making more of these in the future.

#diyknife #recycledplastic #diyrecycling #trashtotreasure

Use Recycled Plastic to Turn a Free Table into $500

Brothers Make 2024-04-05 | Supporting our sponsors helps keep us in the workshop and saving more plastic from becoming pollution 🤙🏽🌏 Get an exclusive NordVPN deal, with an extra four months here ➼ nordvpn.com/brothersmake It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✌

💚 And as always, a huge thank you goes out to The Brotherhood: patreon.com/brothersmake

We found a discarded wooden side table next to a skip outside our workshop. Instead of letting it go to waste, we thought we'd try our hand at upcycling it by giving it a bit of a makeover. We refinished the outside of the table and added a brand new top made from 100% recycled plastic. Since we were feeling fancy, we also added wireless phone charging functionality. We are pretty confident that this little table would fit nicely inside a modern home. We literally turned trash into treasure!

#BrothersMake #HDPE #TrashToTreasure #HDPERecycling #RecycledPlastic #RecycledPlasticBottles #PlasticShredding #InjectionMoulding #PlasticRecycling

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♻️ Check out our recycled plastic store: brothersmake.com/shop
📸 Follow us on Instagram and TikTok: instagram.com/brothersmake | tiktok.com/@brothersmake

FAQ:
➡️ Be sure to watch our recycled plastic safety video first if you fancy giving this a go! youtu.be/EZekQTq0OqA
➡️ We don't buy any of our plastic. It all comes from collection and donations. We have a video all about it: youtu.be/q1EHWjHxSoU
➡️ Our workshop is powered 100% by renewable energy. We don’t use any energy from fossil fuels.

♻️♻️♻️

Music by Epidemic Sound

Making a Stool from Recycled Plastic

Brothers Make 2024-03-28 | This was actually the first ever attempt we had at making a sheet of recycled plastic. We melted 2.2kg of HDPE, which was more than our little panini press could hold, so we'd melt the plastic on the press, and then once melted, keep it warm in a small toaster oven while we continued melting the rest.

Once we had enough, we gave it a few twists and folds to remove any air bubbles and then chucked it in our DIY bottle jack press, to give us a lovely flat sheet of marbled goodness.

After we'd processed the sheet in our Triton thicknesser, and gave it a once over with a card scraper, we knocked up a simple wooden base and attached the whole thing together.

This was three years ago and the stool is still going strong in our workshop! What do you think?

#sustainablediy #recycledplastic #diystool #ecofriendlydesign #ecodiy

The Minion Brick 🍌

Brothers Make 2024-03-26 | ...

Making Recycled Plastic Bottle Openers

Brothers Make 2024-03-21 | Last month we made a video where we used our air fryer to make a bottle opener. We ended up really liking that colourful little chap, so we thought there might be a way of us batching out a small run of these. So after a bit of rummaging around our mould collection to see what would work, we decided to repurpose our pen blank mould to make bottle opener handles and then threaded the bottle opener inserts in.

And there we go, a lovely way to enjoy a cool, refreshing beverage as well as re-use waste plastic AND remind us of the importance of looking after this glorious planet of ours. What more could you ask for from a humble bottle opener?

If you fancy one, they're over on our website at brothersmake.com/shop 🍻

#ecofriendlygifts #sustainablegifts #trashtotreasure #recycledplasticwaste

Fixing Wood with Recycled Plastic ♻️

Brothers Make 2024-03-18 | We took a piece of wood destined for the fire pit and a handful of bottle tops and turned them into this live-edge coffee table with recycled plastic bowties. It was wicked fun combining some woodworking with plastic for this one, and we think the bow ties give a really nice pop of colour to the cookie.

But the stars of the show for this build were without a doubt our @triton_tools routers. Namely, the MOF001 which absolutely blasted through the flattening of our firewood slab, and then the trim router which, with the plunge base chucked on, made it super easy to precisely route out the pocket for the bowtie.

We then popped it on some simple hairpin legs, to leave the top to do the talking, and our waste material project was done! What do you think? 🎀

Ironing Chip Bags to Keep Warm 🔥

Brothers Make 2024-03-14 | So it turns out, that not only can crisp packets be recycled, the foil lining actually provides some great thermal insulation for projects where warmth is key. So we tried our hand at fusing crisp bags together using a standard clothes iron and turned them into a sleeping bag to keep the cold out. It actually works great and it’s incredibly easy to do. The packets fuse quickly and by making them into large sheets, you can quickly put together a huge amount of material to work with.

One thing we’d like to hear your thoughts on is the fusing together of two materials. We always advocate keeping materials separate for future recycling, but since both crisp packets and thin film polyethene have terrible recycling rates, is it better to recycle them into something usable? Another thing top consider is that once made this material is incredibly easy to repair, which will help extend its life. So what do you think? Net positive or not worth the effort?

Be sure to check out The Crisp Packet Project if you want to get involved yourselves! ♨️

Saving Plastic Waste for Turtles 🐢♻️

Brothers Make 2024-03-13 | When we first invested in our injection moulding setup, our ocean keyrings were some of the very first products to be made.

Whenever we're selling our products at markets, these are especially popular with kids, which is always so lovely to see as they're often the most environmentally conscious of us all. They also make for nice little reminders of why recycling is so important in preserving this wonderful planet of ours.

If you fancy one, head on over to brothersmake.com/shop 🐢

Reincarnating our Rubbish ♻️💜 #recycling

Brothers Make 2024-03-12 | Our small plant pots are ideal for adding a pop of colour to your house. Perfect for those eco-mothers who have a love for a bit of greenery in their homes. At 7cm tall, they’re ideal for cacti, succulents or even pens and little trinkets. How dreamy.

The one we made in this video is made in our Cadbury Swirl colourway, which is a Polypropylene blend that comes predominantly from sweet tubs and DVD cases.

They're available on our shop at brothersmake.com if you fancy treating yourself.

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Your Chip Bags Can Save Lives

Brothers Make 2024-03-01 | Supporting our sponsors helps keep us in the workshop and saving more plastic from becoming pollution 🤙🏽🌏 Get an exclusive NordVPN deal, with an extra four months here ➼ nordvpn.com/brothersmake It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✌

💚 And as always, a huge thank you goes out to The Brotherhood: patreon.com/brothersmake

It turns out… we were wrong. Not only can crisp packets be recycled, the foil lining actually provides some great thermal insulation for projects where warmth is key. So in this video, we tried our hand at fusing chip bags using a standard clothes iron and turned them into a sleeping bag to keep the cold out. It actually works great and it’s incredibly easy to do. The packets fuse quickly and by making them into large sheets, you can quickly put together a huge amount of material to work with.

One thing we’d like to hear your thoughts on is the fusing together of 2 materials. Obviously we always advocate to keep materials separate for future recycling, but since both chip packets and thin film polyethylene have terrible recycling rates, is it better to recycle them into something usable? Another thing top consider is that once made this material is incredibly easy to repair, which will help extend its life. So what do you think? Net positive or not worth the effort?

GET INVOLVED:
➡️ If you're UK based, and want to send your crisp packet rows and grids to the Crisp Packet Project Hastings, then you can find their address here: crisppacketproject.com/contact-us
➡️ If you wanted to find a project near you, or set up your own, check out their Facebook group: facebook.com/crisppacketproject
➡️ Or check out their YouTube channel here: @crisppacketprojecthqcic5883

#BrothersMake #CrispPacket #SayNoToSingleUsePlastic #ChipsBags #PlasticPollution #RecycledPlastic #PlasticRecycling

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🛜 Check out our recycled plastic store: brothersmake.com/shop
📸 Follow us on Instagram and TikTok: instagram.com/brothersmake | tiktok.com/@brothersmake

FAQ:
➡️ Be sure to watch our recycled plastic safety video first if you fancy giving this a go! youtu.be/EZekQTq0OqA
➡️ We don't buy any of our plastic. It all comes from collection and donations. We have a video all about it: youtu.be/q1EHWjHxSoU
➡️ Our workshop is powered 100% by renewable energy. We don’t use any energy from fossil fuels.

♻️♻️♻️

Music by Epidemic Sound

Turning Trash into Treasure

Brothers Make 2024-02-26 | We've turned smaller things like recycled plastic pen blanks on our lathe before, but we wanted to see how well it did on something a little bigger. So we made a chunky old blank using 3.5kg of plastic waste and chucked this in our DIY bottle jack press.

Now, we can get by with the odd pen here and there, but we're no experts when it comes to turning. Fortunately, our wonderful friend Jamie from @jpwoodwork was very happy to help us out. So we handed our big green blank over to him to turn into a lovely looking plate.

He said it was super nice to work with and that it looked awesome straight off the tools without any finishing steps needed.

Making Hooks out of Recycled Plastic

Brothers Make 2024-02-22 | Our new hooks are now available!

And don't be fooled by their vibrant charm, each one can handle up to 5kg (that's like 40 bananas, or a greyhound, or a 5kg dumbbell - mind blown). So it's time to hang up your worries, say goodbye to dull walls and hello to a home that's a kaleidoscope of eco-friendly style.

We do pop a couple of screws into your box for each hook, but if you plan on attaching these to a masonry wall, we would recommend grabbing yourself some wall plugs as well to make sure they’re nice and secure.

They've just gone live over in our shop, so head on over to brothersmake.com if you're interested!

Making a Coffee Carrier out of Recycled Plastic

Brothers Make 2024-02-19 | We designed and made this flat-pack coffee cup holder with a carry handle for those coffee lovers who always seem to be carrying a million things at once.

This was made with 550g of collected recycled plastic waste HDPE from bottle lids and milk bottles. Once the plastic was all nice and melted and pressed into a sheet, we chose the scroll saw to cut this out. This is because it has a super thin blade so the waste produced is a lot less. We also collected all of the waste that came off all the tools and used this again in another project.

We went on to use this as a prototype for a product that we sold for over a year. Sadly we have discontinued our two and four-cup coffee caddies, as they were still fairly tricky to make, even when injection moulded, as they came in three parts. So we just need to come up with some clever design tweaks to make it a more viable product.

If you have any suggestions, we're all ears! ☕

How We Make Recycled Plastic Beads

Brothers Make 2024-02-15 | Our recycled plastic beads have become one of our most popular products recently, particularly with crafters and jewellery makers.

Here you can see us making a bunch of 4mm beads in our Solar Flare colourway, which is probably one of our trickier ones to source, as orange and yellow are fairly hard to come by. Fortunately, thanks to lemon-scented bleach bottles and Mr Muscle bottles, we’re all stocked up.

Once the beads are all injected, then comes the long, but fairly satisfying task of snipping them all of the sprue. Though, when we're doing these in thousands, it does become a little tedious. But, we find it's nothing a good podcast can't fix.

These are available on our website if you fancied some - brothersmake.com 🪡

A Recycled Plastic Gift for the Girlfriend

Brothers Make 2024-02-12 | As it's Valentine's Day this week, we thought we'd make something fitting for the occasion out of recycled plastic. And seeing as we're a couple of predictable boys, we of course just went for something red and heart-shaped, as we couldn't work out how to make flowers.

But as unoriginal as our idea was - we're really happy with how this little jewellery dish came out. Armed with our panini press and a bunch of our favourite Triton tools - it was a very pleasant way to spend a morning making this.

All of the tools we use can be found at brothersmake.com/tools if you want fancy grabbing yourself or a loved one something special this Valentine's Day 🧡

Melting Plastic Bags into a Wallet

Brothers Make 2024-02-09 | We wanted to find a way to use other forms of plastic pollution, such as the dreaded single-use plastic carrier bag. These things are a nightmare for the planet - they never break down and animals mistake them for food. We've all seen the videos of hungry turtles mistaking a plastic bag for a jellyfish.

So we wanted to show you how you can take plastic bags and turn them into a tough flexible fabric-like sheet. The beauty of this technique is that you don't need any specialist tools to do it, just an iron and a few basic crafting tools. You can then turn it into pretty much anything you would make out of leather!

Here we're making a simple wallet, just using a template that we found online, but realistically the only limitation is your imagination. What else do you think would be good to make using this technique?

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The Barbie Brick

Brothers Make 2024-02-07 | We're going to build a wall and get YOU to design it!

We have nine different options in our colour range, and we want some sweet new ideas from you lot. So to test these out, we're going to try them out, brick by brick, to see how they look.

Kicking things off, we decided to make the Barbie brick, made predominantly from Barbie DVD cases mixed with some white. What do you think?

Let us know below if there's a theme that you think would work well and we'll choose our favourite for the next video!

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Don’t Eat This

Brothers Make 2024-02-01 | We get a lot of comments saying that you guys want to try melting plastic at home without a lot of the expensive equipment we're fortunate to have in our workshop. Now, we have made a load of videos using a flat-plate panini press, but it seems like that specific machine (Breville VTS026) is quite tricky to get your hands on in some countries. So, we decided we were going to find a suitable alternative for all of you budding DIY recyclers out there!

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Can you use an Air Fryer to Recycle Plastic?

Brothers Make 2024-01-26 | Go to https://sponsr.is/cs_brothersmake and use code BROTHERSMAKE to save 25% off today. A massive thanks goes out to Curiosity Stream for sponsoring this video. Supporting our sponsors helps keep us in the workshop and saving more plastic from becoming pollution 🤙🏽

We get a lot of comments saying that you guys want to try melting plastic at home without a lot of the expensive equipment we're fortunate to have in our workshop. Now, we have made a load of videos using a flat-plate panini press, but it seems like that specific machine (Breville VTS026) is quite tricky to get your hands on in some countries. So, we decided we were going to find a suitable alternative for all of you budding DIY recyclers out there!

#BrothersMake #HDPE #PreciousPlastic #HDPERecycling #RecycledPlastic #RecycledPlasticBottles #PlasticShredding #InjectionMoulding #PlasticRecycling

♻️♻️♻️

♻️ Check out our recycled plastic store: brothersmake.com/shop
📸 Follow us on Instagram and TikTok: instagram.com/brothersmake | tiktok.com/@brothersmake

FAQ:
➡️ Be sure to watch our recycled plastic safety video first if you fancy giving this a go! youtu.be/EZekQTq0OqA
➡️ We don't buy any of our plastic. It all comes from collection and donations. We have a video all about it: youtu.be/q1EHWjHxSoU
➡️ Our workshop is powered 100% by renewable energy. We don’t use any energy from fossil fuels.

♻️♻️♻️

Music by Epidemic Sound

How Recycled Plastic Door Knobs Are Made

Brothers Make 2024-01-25 | Here you can see us fulfilling an order for some of our recycled plastic door knobs, which are a really nice way to bring a little bit of eco-friendly colour to a plain old set of drawers.

The ones you can see us making here are in our 'Smoke on the Water' colourway, which is made up of white, black and clear polypropylene - which we mainly source from old DVD and video game cases.

There is a little bit of post-processing needed on these once they've been injected and snipped. So once done, we throw them onto our pillar drill (being sure to save all the waste) and screw in some threaded inserts. Then we box them up with their 6mm bolt and they're ready to go!

If you fancy a set for yourself, you can grab them from brothersmake.com 🤙🏼

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Melting Ocean Plastic into Beach Toys

Brothers Make 2024-01-22 | We spent a day with the wonderful Oly from Project Planet Earth, cleaning up a stunning part of the UK's south coast. But we wanted to see if we could take some of that plastic and make something with it there on the beach.

So, armed with our solar powered generator, we took our little panini press down onto the beach with us as and melted down some of the HDPE that we picked up along the way. Once it had all melted and had the obligatory twists and folds, we squished it into a little beach bat mould we knocked together so that we could have a little game of bat and ball on the beach.

The beach bats came out really nicely and worked a treat, and all in all it made for an extremely wholesome day!

Is there anything else beachy that you think we could make this way?

☀️

How Recycled Plastic Plant Pots Are Made

Brothers Make 2024-01-18 | These plant pots were one of the first things we ever made when we first bought our injection moulding machines. Most of our products go through different design iterations and change overtime, but these trusty plant pots are exactly the same as the first one we made in our old garage.

These ones are 10cm wide and tall so are perfect for little house plants, herbs and succulents. A lot of people ask for bigger ones, but due to our injection capacity, this is about as big as we can go for the time being - but this might increase in the future! 🤞🏽

The colour blend we're using for this pot is called 'Jungle Haze' which is an HDPE blend made up of bottle tops as well as shampoo and detergent bottles. But these pots are available in all of our colourways. Don't worry, we always stamp it with the relevant resin ID code on the bottom, so it can easily be recycled in the future!

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Easy DIY Recycled Plastic Mallet

Brothers Make 2024-01-16 | One of the first things we ever made out of recycled plastic were mallets. To this day we still use our beaten up old HDPE mallet and it works like a dream as it's such a dense material.

We've tried a number of different ways to make these, but we wanted to work out the easiest method possible. To do this, all you really need is a tin can and a heat gun. You just need add your HDPE plastic in bit by bit, squishing it down and applying heat until your tin is nice and full. Once it's completely full you can push your handle in place, add some scrap wood with a hole in to help apply clamping pressure and clamp it all down.

Once cooled, you just need to take of the tin and you've got yourself an awesome little mallet! If you want it to look a bit prettier, you can pop it on the lathe like we've done here, but if not, it works perfectly as is.

Be sure to let us know if you give one a go!

How Beads are Made from Plastic Waste

Brothers Make 2024-01-03 | This mould was one of our very first moulds we ever received, which makes 10 beads at a time. We could absolutely make this more efficient by making a new mould with lots more cavities, but bigger mould = higher cost, and so far this one has been doing us just fine!

These little donut shaped beads are popular with jewellery makers. We also want to make a full size fly curtain in the summer made out of thousands of these! An abacus could also be really fun with multi coloured beads.

This colourway is one of our most popular, called ‘Nebula’. Every time we overfill a mould or an injection fails for whatever reason, we re-shred that plastic down and and use it for this awesome, multi-coloured blend. It’s our most sustainable colour and super popular.

What should we make next?

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#recycledplasticwaste #jewellerymaker #jewelrydesigner #kandibracelet #beadmaker

Turning 3D Printing Waste into a Skull

Brothers Make 2023-12-31 | We’ve seen quite a few people trying out melting down 3D printing waste into these skull moulds, so we thought we’d give it a go ourselves!

After a few tries of just putting the PLA in one of these silicone candle moulds, letting it melt down, and repeating the process over and over again, we thought that while it worked well - it could be sped up significantly.

So instead, we dumped a load of PLA waste onto our panini press, let it melt, and then cut it up into little pillows. Once cool, this gave us far denser pieces of plastic to work with. Then, when we loaded them up into the mould, there were far less air bubbles, and it took about a quarter of the time to completely fill.

We also wanted to experiment with colouring the plastic, so we added some gold micah powder to the inside of the mould, which worked great. We’re unsure how this would affect its future recyclability, so if you know - we’d love to hear! Otherwise, the effect without the powder looks awesome anyway so we’ll probably just go with the natural look next time.

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How Recycled Plastic Spinning Tops Are Made

Brothers Make 2023-12-28 | We make a lot of these little spinning tops whenever we’re doing demos - especially with kids, as they’re a great way to show them our full recycling process, as well as give them something to take home to play with.

They’ve also been super popular over Christmas as stocking fillers, so we thought we’d film one to show you how they’re made.

This is our Solar Flare colour blend, which is probably one of our trickier ones to source, as orange and yellow are fairly hard to come by. Fortunately, thanks to lemon scented bleach bottles and Mr Muscle bottles, we’re all stocked up.

If nothing else, these spinning tops can always be used to keep yourself calibrated between the real world and your dreams like a young eco-conscious Leonardo DiCaprio.

What shall we make next? 💡

#recycledplastic #ecofriendly #sustainablegifts #howitsmade #plasticwaste #spinningtop

Christmas Decorations from Bottle Tops

Brothers Make 2023-12-21 | ‘tis the season to show you how we made this sweet little slot-together Christmas tree decoration using 100% plastic waste. This colour is not one of our custom colourways (mainly because gold HDPE is so rare) but we thought we’d make a special appearance since we’re feeling festive!

This is one of our older style sandwich plate moulds, which gets stacked together with a top and bottom plate, then the plastic is injected through the hole in the top plate.

This mould makes one singe 3D decoration, which just needs a hole through the top then it can be hung on the tree!

Other than gold and white, what other Christmas colours could we try for our little decoration? Maybe we can fill a whole tree with them in all your lovely colour suggestions!

Happy holidays all!

🎄

#ecochristmas #reduceplasticwaste #plasticfreechristmas #recycledplastic #sustainablechristmas

Turning 3D Printing Waste into Crocs

Brothers Make 2023-12-19 | We’ve been testing how we can recycle PLA waste from failed 3D prints and expired filament reels. We found this little oven-safe silicone croc mould online and made a recycled PLA croc keyring for our friend @EmilyTheEngineer as part of YouTube Makers Secret Santa 2023.

I think it’s safe to say she likes it! Check out the full video on our channel and find out how to make these yourself. And be sure to check out her channel to see her reaction along with the insanely cool stuff she makes. 🐊

Can 3D Printing WASTE be Recycled at Home?

Brothers Make 2023-12-17 | Supporting our sponsors helps keep us in the workshop and saving more plastic from becoming pollution 🤙🏽🌏 Get an exclusive NordVPN deal, with an extra four months here ➼ nordvpn.com/brothersmake It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✌

💚 And as always, a huge thank you goes out to The Brotherhood: patreon.com/brothersmake

We were invited to take part in YouTube Makers Secret Santa! We decided to test out whether waste PLA from 3D printers can be recycled and turned into new objects. So after attempting a few smaller things, we made a solid infinity gauntlet for 3D Printing Pro - Emily the Engineer. Plus, Ruth and Shawn from Kids Invent Stuff made us a giant ice cream cannon out of an old traffic cone and we shot it at Matt!

@EmilyTheEngineer video: youtube.com/watch?v=vW3jTTk9AHQ
@KidsInventStuff video: youtu.be/5_trQ9EQZgo
All videos this year: youtube.com/watch?v=IK3jLYR-aC4&list=PLBsfTOjKcQe-hKw23746QrYRzt_Z7v7rF

Secret Santa 2023 Gang:
@KidsInventStuff
@emi@EmilyTheEngineer
@colinfurze
@alispagnola
@xylafoxlin
@ThisOldTony
@BeckyStern
@LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER
@jamesbruton

#YTMakersSecretSanta #BrothersMake #InfinityGauntlet #3DPrinting #RecycledPlastic #RecycledPLA #PlasticShredding #InjectionMoulding #PlasticRecycling

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♻️ Check out our recycled plastic store: brothersmake.com/shop
📸 Follow us on Instagram and TikTok: instagram.com/brothersmake | tiktok.com/@brothersmake

FAQ:
➡️ Be sure to watch our recycled plastic safety video first if you fancy giving this a go! youtu.be/EZekQTq0OqA
➡️ We don't buy any of our plastic. It all comes from collection and donations. We have a video all about it: youtu.be/q1EHWjHxSoU
➡️ Our workshop is powered 100% by renewable energy. We don’t use any energy from fossil fuels.

♻️♻️♻️

Music by Epidemic Sound

How Recycled Plastic Combs Are Made

Brothers Make 2023-12-13 | We’ve made more combs this year than any other product, all thanks to this beast of a mould we had made to help speed up our output. This one has 2 injections points, producing a total of 3 long combs and 2 short with each cycle.

The colourway you’re seeing us use here is called ‘Jungle Haze’ which is an HDPE blend made up from post consumer waste. The green and blue comes from bottle tops, the yellow comes from bleach containers and the white is typically shampoo, probiotic of cleaning product bottles.

We redesigned these combs last year to improve the moulding time as well as the comfort when using. Because these are 100% separated plastic, they are fully recyclable, which is why we stamp the Resin ID code on.

These work great as detangling combs, shower combs (since they’re completely waterproof and won’t react with any hair products!) or an every day carry comb.

Buy our long combs here: brothersmake.com/shop/p/long-combs
Buy our short combs here: brothersmake.com/shop/p/pocket-combs

What shall we show you how we make next?

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#beautyfromwaste #ecofriendlyhaircare #everydaycarrycommunity #edccomb #sustainablegifts

Recycled Plastic Bricks - Do They Work?

Brothers Make 2023-12-01 | Want to restore the planet's ecosystems and see your impact in monthly videos? For the first 200 people to join Planet Wild, we will personally pay for the first month of your Planet Wild subscription at planetwild.com/brothersmake/foodforest

If you want to get to know them better first, check out their latest video youtube.com/watch?v=m_SzuUHXP1M

💚 And as always, a huge thank you goes out to The Brotherhood: patreon.com/brothersmake

In this video, we're looking at all things Recycled Plastic Bricks. Because on paper, they sound like the ideal solution to not only our plastic pollution problem, but also housing issues. However, it's certainly a complicated subject - so there's a lot to look into! 🧱

A big thank you to Ben and Connor for sharing their knowledge and expertise on the subject. You can find out more about Circular 11 at circular11.com or keep up to date with them over on their Instagram instagram.com/circular_11

And a massive thank you to Rory for sharing his seemingly infinite amount of recycled plastic knowledge. His website can be found by going to https://www.sustainabledesign.studio/ 💡

More information on the brick including the research papers can be found at recyclerebuild.org/recycledbrick
And here's the Rory's video that we mentioned which is definitely worth a watch! youtu.be/Aqn1PYbkgf0?si=vwO92ITb1Fi1kVcO

If you wanted to get a Recycled Plastic Brick mould for yourself, they're available on the Precious Plastic Bazar bazar.preciousplastic.com/moulds/extruder-moulds/v4-open-brick-mould

#BrothersMake #HDPE #PreciousPlastic #HDPERecycling #RecycledPlastic #RecycledPlasticBricks #PlasticShredding #InjectionMoulding #PlasticRecycling

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♻️ Check out our recycled plastic store: brothersmake.com/shop
📸 Follow us on Instagram and TikTok: instagram.com/brothersmake | tiktok.com/@brothersmake

FAQ:
➡️ We sell 100% plastic products on our website! brothersmake.com/shop
➡️ We don't buy any of our plastic. It all comes from collection and donations. We have a video all about it: bit.ly/2RsbhKA
➡️ Our workshop is powered 100% by renewable energy. We don’t use any energy from fossil fuels whatsoever.

♻️♻️♻️

Music by Epidemic Sound

How Recycled Plastic Coasters Are Made

Brothers Make 2023-11-30 | With Christmas around the corner, our list of coaster sets to make skyrockets, so we thought we'd show you exactly how we do it.

We get the mould preheating in the oven to warm it up. This is especially important in cold weather, as the plastic won't flow properly and might result in failed injections. With the mould heating, we can load the plastic into the barrel. This mould needs 130g of plastic flakes. All our plastic comes from donations and collections from our local area, mostly from schools, businesses and beach cleans.

7 minutes later and we can get the mould out of the oven (with gloves of course) and clamp it into the machine. Pulling the wheel forces the ram down and pushes the plastic into the mould. Once both cavities are full, we can immediately unbolt the mould and take the coasters out. They typically only need a little bit of trimming before they're ready to be stamped with the plastic type. These were HDPE ♻️2.

This is actually our second coaster mould. Our first was a lot simpler, but we wanted to add some custom engraving, small feet on the bottom and give them a nicer finish, which is why we shelled out for this new mould.

If you want to grab a set for yourself, or as a gift for someone, you can get them on our website where we have them available in 9 awesome colours: brothersmake.com/shop/p/coasters

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#brothersmake #recycledplasticwaste #recycledplastic #ecofriendly #cleanupchallenge #plasticrecycling #coasters #christmasgiftideas #howitsmade

How We Make Recycled Plastic Bowls

Brothers Make 2023-11-17 | Here's probably the biggest thing our injection moulders are capable of producing in one barrel. Our bowls are made out of 100% recycled polypropylene which is post-consumer waste sourced from our local community. They're not intended to be used as food bowls so are more intended to hold onto your trinkets.

This colour is made up of blue, white and black (mainly sourced from old DVD cases) and is what we call 'Black Ice'.

We're showing you how we make a single bowl, but usually we'd be batching them out using a couple of machines - so while one machine is melting the plastic, the other in filling the mould - which speeds the process up a lot!

➡️ You can grab one here if it tickles your fancy: brothersmake.com/shop/p/bowl

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#ecofriendly #sustainabledesign #recycledplastic #greenliving #brothersmake

Why did we do this 30 times over?

Brothers Make 2023-11-14 | So why did we spend a whole week repeating the same process 30x over? 👇🏽

To test the myth that “plastic can only be recycled ‘X’ amount of times”.

Go online and ask Google that question and you’ll be thrown out a whole load of numbers from 1 time, 3 times, 7 times.. the maximum we seemed to find was 10 times. But nowhere seems to discuss what type of plastic this is, what type of products this is for, or how this can be tested. So… we did it ourselves!

We took the same batch of plastic and cycled it through our machines 30 times and made a product out of every batch. Then we tested these to see if they crumbled into uselessness like the internet would have us believe.

Guess what… they didn’t! We were completely shocked at the results and think that this has really changed the game. We can’t wait to hear what you think. The full video just went live on YouTube.

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#recycledplastic #mythbusters #brothersmake #plasticrecycling #questioneverything

How Many Times Can Plastic REALLY Be Recycled?

Brothers Make 2023-11-10 | Go to https://ground.news/brothers to stay fully informed. Subscribe through our link for as little as $1 a month or get 40% off unlimited access. Supporting our sponsors helps keep us in the workshop and saving more plastic from becoming pollution 🤙🏽

In this video, we’re testing the highly debated topic of ‘how many times can plastic be recycled?’. Looking online gives you a whole host of mixed results with a lot of generalisation about ‘plastic’ as a single material. We decided that we were bored of people using this as an excuse as to why ‘recycling doesn’t work’ and decided to test this out for ourselves.

To be super clear about our tests - we’re using recycled HDPE and running it through our machines at 230 degrees celsius. The plastic is only melted for as long as is necessary and doesn’t ever go beyond this temperature. All of our plastic comes from post-consumer waste sources and we are very careful about sorting, separating and cleaning the plastic before we let it enter our material circulation.

We’re fascinated to hear what you think of these results. We absolutely could have gone beyond 30, but we weren’t expecting the plastic to last as well as it did to be completely honest with you! We can also repeat these tests in other materials to see if the results are similar, so let us know if that’s something you’d like to see.

Oh, and here's a link to our carabiners if you fancy one!
brothersmake.com/shop/p/carabiner

#BrothersMake #HDPE #PreciousPlastic #HDPERecycling #RecycledPlastic #RecycledPlasticBottles #PlasticShredding #InjectionMoulding #PlasticRecycling

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💚 A huge thank you to The Brotherhood: patreon.com/brothersmake
♻️ Check out our recycled plastic store: brothersmake.com/shop
📸 Follow us on Instagram and TikTok: instagram.com/brothersmake | tiktok.com/@brothersmake

FAQ:
➡️ We sell 100% plastic products on our website! brothersmake.com/shop
➡️ We don't buy any of our plastic. It all comes from collection and donations. We have a video all about it: bit.ly/2RsbhKA
➡️ Our workshop is powered 100% by renewable energy. We don’t use any energy from fossil fuels whatsoever.

♻️♻️♻️

Music by Epidemic Sound

How Recycled Plastic Carabiners Are Made

Brothers Make 2023-11-03 | We’re working through some big production on our brand new carabiner design. This colourway is called ‘Tropical Whirlpool’ and is made up of green and blue milk bottle tops and white actimel bottles. This mix needs around 10 minutes to fully soften before we can inject the plastic into the mould.

The mould get warmed in the oven to help the plastic flow nicely. This only needs to happen on the first few injections of the day, because the hot plastic keeps the mould warm for subsequent injections. After 10 minutes, we can clamp the mould in place and inject the plastic by turning the wheel.

The aluminium cools the product almost instantly, so we can de-mould straight away. One quick skip to trim the sprue off and we have a finished product. Perfect for hanging on your water bottle or keys!

➡️ Buy here: brothersmake.com/shop/p/carabiner

We make these in our whole range of 9 custom colours. What colour shall we do next?

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#ecofriendly #cleanupchallenge #recycledplastic #singleusesucks #brothersmake

Finally, a Plastic Bag that’s Good for the Planet

Brothers Make 2023-10-27 | Supporting our sponsors helps keep us in the workshop and saving more plastic from becoming pollution 🤙🏽🌏 Get Exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/brothersmake It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✌

This is now our third plastic bag project, and we're really seeing the potential that this material has. In previous videos we've used an iron to laminate bags together, and while this does work well, it's quite labour intensive for larger sheets. For this one, we've utilised our t-shirt press which works a treat - it's super consistent and is probably about ten times faster. The final result came together a lot nicer than we thought it would! The bag is so robust and can carry a load of stuff with no issue. And if it ever rips or gets a hole, it should be nice and easy to repair with an iron and a couple more bags. Lovely!

A big thank you to Kev for his help on this one, be sure to take a look at some of his work! 🏍
@holygoatcustomsmotorcycles8728
instagram.com/holy_goat_motorcycle_seats

We checked out a lot of different information sources when doing our research for this video. There's plenty out there, but if you wanted to find out more, our main recommendations are:

📖 How Bad Are Bananas? The carbon footprint of everything by Mike Berners-Lee:
amazon.co.uk/How-Bad-Are-Bananas-everything/dp/1788163818

🎧 TED Climate - What happens to the plastic you throw away:
ted.com/podcasts/ted-climate-what-happens-to-the-plastic-you-throw-away-transcript

🎥 iJessup's DIY Better Plastic BagBag:
youtube.com/watch?v=taHUTL0-Z60

#BrothersMake #PlasticBag #PlasticPollution #PreciousPlastic #RecycledPlastic #plasticrecyclingmachine

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💚 A huge thank you to The Brotherhood: patreon.com/brothersmake
♻️ Check out our recycled plastic store: brothersmake.com/shop
📸 Follow us on Instagram and TikTok: instagram.com/brothersmake | tiktok.com/@brothersmake

FAQ:
➡️ We sell 100% plastic products on our website! brothersmake.com/shop
➡️ We don't buy any of our plastic. It all comes from collection and donations. We have a video all about it: bit.ly/2RsbhKA
➡️ Our workshop is powered 100% by renewable energy. We don’t use any energy from fossil fuels whatsoever.

♻️♻️♻️

Music by Epidemic Sound

How Recycled Plastic Buttons Are Made

Brothers Make 2023-10-09 | We’ve been making a butt-ton of buttons recently, so we thought we’d take you guys along for the ride and show you how our injection moulding process looks.

Everything starts with the source plastic. This colourway is called ‘Blue Galaxy’ and is made up of blue milk bottle tops, purple water bottle tops and white shampoo bottles. We pre-weigh the plastic and load it into the hopper. Since all our plastic stock is recycled, different colours behave differently in the machine. This batch needed 8 minutes to fully soften until we could inject into the mould.

We always pre-heat our moulds in our repurposed oven as this helps to improve the flow of plastic in the mould as well as the surface finish. Once the mould is warm and the plastic has melted, we clamp the mould in place and turn the injection wheel by hand. Doing it this way gives us a feel for when the mould is full. Mass production plastic moulding companies like the repeatability and predictability of virgin plastic, as they can program their machines with the same pressure for every cycle. Sure this way is slower, but it works great for recycled plastic shred.

The aluminium mould cools the plastic almost instantly, meaning we can demould straight away. Some colourways need polishing, but Blue Galaxy pops out of the mould nicely and just needs the excess trimming off, which of course, all gets saved and reused.

Our 11mm recycled plastic buttons are available to buy on our website in any of our 9 custom colourways, or as assorted packs.

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#ecofriendly #sustainablefashion #greatbritishsewingbee #buttonsbuttonsbuttons #cleanupchallenge #brothersmake #plasticrecycling #recycledplastic