A Question For All You Pen Turners Out There, Professional And Amateur...

[Security-Man2k]

I have been pen turning for a few months now and with all the talk of the enviroment and plastics being found even in the bottom of the oceans i wanted to know something.

 

 

What do you do with off cuts or blacks, broken pieces or ribbons/chips that comer off while turning?

 

 

I have no idea if they are recyclable or not. Whether they can be somehow made into new blanks. Any ideas?

[mehandiratta]

I am not an expert .... Broken Pieces either can be made as pen pillows.... or can even be casted in Resin

[Security-Man2k]

Oh cool, i had never even thought of the pen rest option before. Thank you!

[Inspector]

Pen blank off cuts can be glued together to make bigger blanks and you can add the waste to resin and sometimes end up with something that looks good but in the grand scream of things the amount of plastic waste from pens is nothing. You can do more to reduce plastic waste by avoiding as much single use plastic as possible. Our pens are used for many decades, hopefully. Throw away pens are not and there are tons of them, not to mention the packaging they all come in. My waste goes to the landfill (dump) where it sits buried until the day when it will be mined to recover the wastes that don't decompose. Your other option is to only use plant and animal sources materials to make pens with that would decompose if discarded. Wood, bone, horn, antler, et cetera.

 

Pete

[Security-Man2k]

Fair enough. I do try to reduce the plastics that I use and just thought that every little helps. You know.

[Inspector]

I agree there is way too much use of plastic where it isn't warranted. I'd go back to the days in a heartbeat when pop came in glass bottles that were reused dozens of times and beer bottles were all stubbies that were the same no matter who's brand but marketing hates that kind of thing. I could rant on about the waste and hypocrisy of leaders like our PM that tells us to stop using plastics even though his household uses 300 water bottles a month but we would be straying a long way from pens.

 

Pete

[richardandtracy]

I think there is a fair bit of foolishness spouted in the press about plastics in general. Many plastics are the best solution to a particular problem by a long shot, with alternative materials either failing to do the job properly or representing considerably more embodied CO₂.

 

I do think single use plastics for packaging should come from a limited list of recyclable plastics, that way the amount available for recycling could increase rapidly.

For items with a design life exceeding 1 year, there are frequently few alternatives that produce less CO₂. In many cases the alternatives are brass or aluminium. Aluminium is recyclable, but when first smelted it creates huge amounts of CO₂. OK, the smelting energy is usually electric & can be carbon neutral, but the electrodes to complete the circuit are graphite which burn off rapidly and are certainly not carbon neutral. Brass is considerably less environmentally friendly for its initial manufacture. Copper & Zinc extraction are major mining concerns that can cause massive environmental impact, and the energy for smelting usually comes from coke as CO is the active agent in the furnace. So brass represents rather more embodied CO₂ than even aluminium.

 

So, what could you do with your plastic swarf? To be honest, I haven't found anything sensible to do with it. Could theoretically mix it up with polyester resin & cast stuff from it. But polyester isn't a very good material to make pens with, and to have acrylic swarf running through makes it even worse, they don't stick well together and the result is very friable. I do bin my swarf. I get maybe a bucketful a month, which makes it maybe 10% of my household plastic waste by volume, and around 3% by weight. In all honesty, I think we produce less plastic waste than our neighbours regardless of the extra from my turning just by the type of things we buy and how much we try to eke out product life by careful use and re-use.

If the swarf is released into the environment as swarf, I think it's machined so thinly normally that the material degrades rapidly under UV action and breaks down into tiny bits. In this state it may stay in the environment for a few years, but is there a problem? The bits will be small enough for nematodes and other invertebrates to ingest. But what causes that to be a problem? Such invertebrates already ingest sand, an inert material they don't get nutrients from. How is plastic different? The large surface area of swarf will provide a good area for fungi and bacteria to latch on to, and may even increase the nutrient density compared to sand when an invertebrate ingests it.

 

So, while I don't advocate releasing dusted swarf into the wind, I remain to be convinced that it's an environmental pollutant any more than sand or dust is. So far, I have never seen any evidence to indicate that invertebrates are harmed by plastic particles even though there is evidence that they ingest plastics. It may be that the colourants leach out and cause problems, but I have yet to see any evidence of harm. At the moment evidence of presence is being taken as evidence of harm. The two are not synonymous, and the sloppy thinking adopted by many environmentalists is harming their case.

 

Regards,

 

Richard

[Security-Man2k]

Fair point. You have answered my question in part when you spoke about recasting the ribbons. Thank you for that Richard. When I make a pen I try to keep waste to a minimum and that factors into the design of my pens. I am still learning so I am trying to drill into myself stuff which will help me in the future. As the world goes mad over plastic pollution these sorts of things will filter down into all sorts of industry with controls put in place over things like plastic waste. If I adopt a system to deal with this before it becomes something which is put into place without my control then I am already prepared.

 

 

The thing about the whole discussion about plastic pollution and how harmful it is isn't generally up to the individual to decide. Rules and restrictions are generally decided by the politicians who will only do what will get the masses to vote for them, and in general the masses are guided by the media and the media are idiots who blow everything out of proportion. So what we find happens is that scientists will reveal something, the media will grab a hold of it and we will see this findings spun by the media, the masses will get the wrong end of the stick normally and then the politicians will try to appease the masses by bringing in the restrictions and rules. But that may be my cynicism coming into play.

 

 

All I am doing at the moment is collecting most of the swarf up and putting it into the recycling bins. The broken parts I tend to keep just in case I can find a use for them.

[richardandtracy]

Where I am in Kent, acrylic is not considered a recyclable material by the local council, and I suspect putting acrylic swarf into the mixed recycling bins we have would not be a success. The plastic has to be identifiable for it to be separated out and recycled, and swarf tends to be a bit small to mark with the material code. Just looking at the swarf is virtually impossible to identify whether it's acrylic, polyester or alumillite. Polyester and alumillite are not thermoplastics, so are impossible to recycle in any meaningful way (possibly ground up and used as a filler, but they cannot be melted together as the chemistry of the plastics means they decay rather than melt with heat), and I have no idea how the various acrylic alloys recycle together.

 

Just as a bit of background, I'm not a scientist specialising in this, simply an engineer dealing with packaging who has to consider recycling as part of the manufacture to disposal cycle for the stuff I design. In many cases, the difficulty of recycling means I have to specify metals where I'd really prefer some mildly exotic plastics that would be easier to manufacture, but as they cannot be recycled, our customers won't have them. Strangely, when it comes to rubbers, our customers don't like castable non-recyclable polyurethane rubbers, but will accept equally non-recyclable castable silicone rubber. There's none so odd as folk.

 

Regards,

 

Richard.

[Security-Man2k]

Fair enough, well I didn't know that about the process of recycling, so thank you for that. It has helped me understand some more of what goes into it. Here I was thinking I was doing a bit of good. I try to do my part with recycling but it it's kind of hard with bosses that don't care and a house with two small children. I work a lot with Upvc, timber, aluminium and glass. Luckily our clients take most of their specimens away with them so we don't have to worry about it all.

 

Anyway, just wanted to say thank you for teaching me something.

 

Take care.

 

Dennis