Blog Post Week 3

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The Shredding of Polyethylene



The picture above from me is Low density Polyethylene, also known as SPI 4. Which items like Plastic cling wrap, sandwich bags, squeezable bottles, and plastic grocery bags are made of. This product was given to me by Matt who found it in the chemical room. I decided to use it instead of using the Plastics bags since this will be easier to shred. The Polyethylene approximately needs to be at least ⅓ of it size to fit the size of a micro plastic.It also needs to be shredded because over time plastic dissolves and turns into smaller and smaller fragments. So what I was thinking for this shredding process is to superglue a lot of the beads into like a bar soap looking shape, and then just shredding them with the object that looks like a nail filer, therefore I should be left with dust particles in the end.

Comments

  1. Mary HelenMarch 3, 2017 at 10:39 AM

    Hi Jasmine,
    I saw you shredding plastic in lab and didn’t really know why and after reading your blog this project sounds really interesting. Changing to polyethylene beads for shredding is a great idea. Being able to mold the plastic beads into a solid shape that makes for easy shredding is a really smart. When you were choosing what kind of shredder to use did you go with a kitchen citrus grater or is it an industrial/lab quality grater?

    ReplyDelete

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