Two years ago one Flagstaff woman, Karyn Kunst, reached out to the community to help her collect bottle caps for recycling.

Kunst said she’s always been passionate about the environment. That’s led her to think seriously about what she can do to reduce her environmental impact.

Back in 2019, Kunst said discovering that plastics in the region were no longer being recycled gave her the push she needed to move forward with her own small-scale plastic recycling.

Kunst discovered through trial and error that she could use bottle caps, items that are often removed during the recycling process and thrown in the garbage, to create plastic filament that can be used by a 3-D printer to create something new.

That may sound easy, but the process of modifying what was initially a shredder designed for credit cards to accept the larger bottle caps required a fair amount of ingenuity.

Kunst says when she finally got it all working, taking the shredded plastic and turning it into the plastic filament, she found it was a very slow process with the equipment she had on hand. “It took a very long time, and I had some concerns about the fumes from the melting plastic.

“I realized this was not the route to go,” she says.

Instead, she started looking at scrapping the idea of reusing the shredded plastic in a 3-D printer, and instead, melting and filling a mold with it.

Along the discovery process Kunst had help from a group of like-minded small recyclers called Precious Plastic. “It’s a global group who share ideas. The group shares plans for building things like small scale shredders, extruders, and injectors.”

“Precious Plastic is a combination of people, machines, platforms, and knowledge to create an alternative global recycling system,” says the group.

Through this group Kunst was able to gain access to a global map to potentially collaborate with other nearby recyclers.

However, she says when she first joined Precious Plastic, there was really no one else in Alberta registered, other than a company in Calgary who was still in the discovery phase.

There was one in Saskatchewan, Round 2 Plastics, that Kunst reached out to, but although they were very willing to share what they’d learned, they were too far away for a collaboration to be practical.

“Then I checked the map again, more recently, and found a brand new pin from a small company in Edmonton called Nada Makes.” She says her new contact not only had built a working injector, but was willing to collaborate with her.

Nada Makes had used plans shared through that group to build an injector. The injector takes the shredded plastic, melts it, and fills a mold.

Kunst also used plans she accessed through the group to build a new, larger shredder. “That was a learning process,” she says, adding that her father, Hank Kunst and another friend, helped her a lot with building the new shredder.

“I can now process more caps at a time, as well as #2 and #5 plastics.

“These are things like cottage cheese and large yogurt containers, and sometimes laundry detergent bottles or shampoo bottles.”

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Leslie Cholowsky
Editor