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Recycle those plastic shopping bags

10K views 9 replies 6 participants last post by  shariyamartin 
#1 ·
Recycle those plastic shopping bags

WOW I'm so excited.

My wife brought home a book from the library the other day, and among other things there was a section about making purses, wallets, pillows etc. from fused together plastic shopping bags. Well me being the cheapskate that I am (oops I mean recycling conscious citizen) decided to try this out but apply the technique in a roofing application, and possible siding too.

I have a second chicken coop i need to finish up in the next couple of weeks and I thought maybe if i make the fused bags thick enough I can get a decent shingle out of them. I'm pretty sure that these bags are made to be semi-biodegradable so a friend told me about a product from Krylon that supposedly bonds to the plastic, giving it a better protective coating. If any of you have any ideas on this I would greatly appreciate them.

For my first test case I just finished up a mega feeder for the chickens and I'm going to get my first set of bag shingles put on it this weekend. I think i'm going to leave this one O-natural and see if the sun and weather mess with the integrity over the next year or so.

Anyway if anyone is interested in a possible blog about the bag technique I'll get some pics of the feeder up this weekend and try to get one going..
 
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#2 ·
I'll save you a little suspense: polyethylene plastics quickly decompose in direct exposure to UV light. If those plastic bags are use for roofing with no extra protection, they will quickly get brittle and flaky, and will fail fairly quickly.

Than being said, I am quite intrigued by the idea! I would love to see how a roof "thatched" with multiple layers of plastic bags would hold up. When the layers start getting too flaky, vacuum them off and put a new layer of bags down on top. Hmm. . . . .
 
#5 ·
this sound like a very interressting idea
nomatter how much we try to remember our shoppingbags
it seems to me over a short period plasticbags is all over again
and here in Denmark you give around 50 cent each time in the stores
we try to reuse them as much as possiple but I can´t ceep up with them…....LOL

so lets see a serius good blog (as we know you will ) about these things

on advance Thank´s

Dennis
 
#6 ·
Dennis/Rance Kewl then,, I guess I'll get some pic's of the process this weekend and post it on up LOL..

David-- I was afraid of that but I think I'll try that out with the vacumming and replacing, its going to be a simple covering though not thatching on the feeder hee hee But when I get to the chicken coop hmmm a nice thatch with alternating colors for contrast, those chicks will be living the high life ..

Purplev- not sure but in the feeder's case it was all made from leftover materials, the chicken coop on the other hand is being made from pallet wood gathered from various furniture shops that didn't want them. Hmmmm maybe a tax right off too LOL
 
#10 ·
Actually plastics are mostly non degradable if possible then plastic bags takes about 1,000 years to decay. So you can think it will be wasting time to wait to make plastic decay, simply harming our environment. What we can do is recycling those plastics and use them effectively. We produce many such products made from such recycled plastics attaining the goal of "reduce, reuse and recycle". Plastic furniture, plastic wood are some of the best examples or it!!
 
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