video blog "giving packaging new life" & "how its made"

In the videos they show how packaging is made and also how they are recycled. It’s a good thing for industrial designers to know so they are aware of what the manufacturing and recycling processes entail. It is useful to know for all so that they know the impact and/or damage done to the environment.

It was interesting to see how aluminium cans are produced and recycled. They are made from very little metal and you can reuse the aluminium as many times as you can without losing any quality. They can be recycled and formed back into sheet metal ready to use for the next batch. The excess cut offs from the stamping is also returned to the recycling plant to be melted down and formed into sheets. Packaging tubes are also made of aluminium and can be used to store creams and gels due to its malleable properties. The protective coating helps to form a barrier between the contents and the metal.

Tetra packs are also really interesting to be seen recycled. I always thought that it couldn’t be recycled due the bonding of foil, cardboard and plastic. But with technology these days the materials can be separated and then recycled.

Another interesting video was seeing how glass bottles are recycled. They are put into different colours so they don’t have to re-colour them. Recycling glass has to be quite precise in that the colours can not be contaminated otherwise it will compromise the quality of the colour, especially with clear glass. They combat this using a camera which photographs the pieces and scans for impurities. The impurities are then blown away with jets.

Cardboard packaging bonds layers of flat and corrugated boards to create thickness and strength while still being lightweight. Cardboard packaging can then be recycled to create newspaper print and toilet paper.

The technology used for sorting and recycling wastes is quite interesting especially the photoscanner and blower technique. Magnets are used to separate the metals from cardboards and plastics. And the technique they use for separating plastic and cardboard is where they ground the materials and put it in a blower, the lighterr materials fall over the edge and the heavier ones are passed through o the next stage.