Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Recycle Plastic Bags Into Plastic Sheets”.
I always have a lot of plastic bags lying around my house and i wanted to see if there was a way that i could reuse them. So i worked out a simple way to turn plastic grocery bags into thicker sheets of plastic that i could use in crafts projects. Here’S how to do it. The first thing that you need to do is get a lot of plastic bags.
I used high density polyethylene grocery bags. Next, you need to cut the bags into sheets start by cutting off the bottom. Seam then cut off the handles, make one more cut down the side of the bag and you can unfold it into a sheet.
I also decided to cut off the section with all the writing, because i wanted plain white sheets to work with now: you’re ready to fuse the bags together start by laying down a large piece of baking parchment on a heat resistant surface then lay down four plastic Sheets place one more piece of baking parchment on top of them now take your iron and set it to medium heat, slowly iron over the sheets, pressing firmly as you go after going over everything a few times check to see if the plastic is fused together. If the individual sheets will still separate, then you need to turn up the heat a little. But if you’re accidentally melting holes in the plastic, then you need to turn down the heat repeat this process with the rest of your bags, making as many four ply sheets as you can, to make thicker or larger sheets of plastic. All you have to do is combine multiple four ply sheets together to do this. Just take two of the plastic sheets and place them between the pieces of baking parchment iron over them, just like you did before it’ll take a little longer to fuse them together, because these sheets are thicker. You can continue adding layers like this until you reach the desired thickness.
I used a total of 64 layers. This gave me a piece that was about 0.1 inches thick. This was a pretty sturdy piece of plastic, but it has small gaps and bubbles between the layers that weaken it to make it stronger.
I decided to press it and re-melt it to do this. I took a metal baking sheet and covered it with parchment paper. Then i placed on the plastic and covered that with parchment paper.
Lastly, i put one more metal baking sheet on top to press it all together, find a heat resistant weight such as a heavy brick then set it on top and place. The whole thing in your oven set the temperature to 400 degrees and let it heat up for about half an hour, then remove it from the oven and let it cool back down to room temperature. This process should have refused all the layers together and made a much stronger and sturdier piece of plastic. Now all you have to do is trim off the rough edges with a pair of scissors, and you have a solid sheet of plastic that you can use in your craft projects. This is one way that you can recycle plastic at home, thanks for watching and check back next week for more diy hacks and how to’s you .