Industrial recycling in Australia
At Defy Design, I worked across an industrial recycled-plastic production line and led mechanical improvements to the upper wash basin, filtration, structure, drive system, material handling, and floor equipment. Hover or click a process stage to see how it works and what I built.
Shredding
Post industrial and post consumer plastic gets granulated into flakes. Sorting by polymer and colour happens before this step, because contamination here ruins everything downstream. Offcuts from later stages loop straight back into this hopper.
When the hopper bags needed to be taken from the initial hopper to the auger, staff would have to awkwardly angle the forklift under the stand as the bottom of the hopper went below the lip of the bag. Using offcuts from the main production line, I designed 400mm lift blocks to carry the 1 ton load and prevent side-side oscillation.
