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From plastic waste to protective gear

#PlasticFreeJuly
Armed with a bucket-full of plastic scraps from a 3D printer, Engineering Product Design students got busy making treasure out of trash this semester.

“First, we shredded up ABS (plastic) in the maker space,” student Levi Painter explains. “The original plan was to use the heat press to make sheets of ABS and then weld the layers together, so they would fit in the thermoformer. But then instead we used my flat’s toastie press to create the sheets which we formed around the moulds while they were hot.”

The programme was helping students to think differently she said. “Just because there are machines here, you don’t have to do it that way, you can always create product’s another way. There’s a lot of thinking outside the box in product design.”

The team of Levi Painter, Joshua Wilson, Annabel Rutherford-Levien and Al-Rafi Bandie passed the challenge. “I am very pleased and proud of my students’ effort, passion, and creative thinking,” Industrial Product Design Lecturer Hossein Najaf Zadeh says.

“Recycling the selected waste plastics presents a big challenge to New Zealand’s recycling infrastructure. This will benefit from better uses of plastics, such as PLA (coffee cup covers and 3D printing filaments), high-density polypropylene (milk and water jugs), and low-density polyethene (from ropes to carpets and clothing).

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