hello all,
i have alot of sprue from kits that i have built in boxes and put in storage.
i have used some for antennas,gap filling,etc.but i can only use so much for my models and/or dio's
does anyone know if the model manufactures will accept the scrape sprue for recycling. the recyclers here will not take sprue's for recycling.
i will pay to ship them to a company,and it might help to keep the costs for the kits down,if we could recycle as much as we can.
remember that the plastic sprue is made out of oil,and with oil going up,this might help keep the prices down.
so maybe we, as a community , might be able to help the environment and our hobby,by recycling as much as we can.
thanks for any help i can get.
cheers,
Bruce

I don't know of any manufactures that accept the scrap sprues.

hello Dave,
that is what i thought,but maybe this might get the manufactures to think about recycling.
cheers,
Bruce

I don't know about the US but in the UK we have plastic recycling skips outside retail outlets

hello Darren,
there are alot of places to recycle here in Colorado,but they go by a plastic code and sprue has no such code.so they will not take them.
what i am hoping for is a small company anywhere in the world that will take the old sprue and reuse them in kits or anything else.i am willing to pay to ship tthem anywhere and with no value to them there should not be an custom charges.
with the start of this topic,maybe us hobbist can get the companies to think about reycling.
cheers,
Bruce

hey Bruce,
for us,are garbage is picked up once a week,Friday's,and we set it out,along with containers(bins) that are for recyclable items,paper,plastic,aluminum,tin,etc; a separate truck comes by and empty's these bins,so my empty sprues are recycled,I thought all garbage companies had to offer recycling programs,to their customer's?

Joe

Bruce: If your looking to get rid of your sprue I'll be glad to take it of your hands. I use it to sclupt figures with. If you look at my kitmaker gallery you'll see what i can do with the stuff. I've been using old computer plastic but its hard to work with.. Anyway another options for you.

hello Anthony,
send me a pm with your address,and i will send them to you by post.
and when i get another box full, i will send them to you.
cheers,
Bruce

hello Joe,
where i live,way up in the mountains,i do not have regular garbage pickup.i recycle 90% at my home.anything else is taken to the dump every 6 months.
thanks for the info about garbage companies recycling,hopefully others will read this and start recycling if they don't.
cheers,
Bruce

If the recyclers take foam coffee cups and clamshell to-go containers,they should take sprue. It's the same styrene!
Cheers!

hello Rick,
most recycling sites i have been to will not take sprue's.i tried to sneak some in with my other plastic,they found it,and i was told not to come back.i now use a non-profit for my recycling now.they help alot of people.

no worries,Anthony wants all my old sprue's to sculpt figures with.and for 8 bucks for all i can stuff in the overnight envelope not a bad deal.
Calf, is way ahead of the rest of the country recycling,hopefully we will catch up with our recycling programs
thanks for reminding me how good Calf, does recycling.
cheers,
Bruce

Hi Bruce! Yes, the Republic of Cali does do a good job of recycling.But you pay for it.We have probably got the highest garbage/trash bill in the nation,on average. A nice thing though, when I had my old Chevy,I could put the used motor oil back in the quart containers,put them in a plastic bag,and then put them at he curb on trashday/recycle day(twice a month). along with yard and garden clips, trims container. By volume,my recycling is about 8:1 over 'trash'. Even the collected trash goes to a transfer station and sorted for recyclables before going to landfill. Sorry if this got
Rick

Bruce
It's great that you want to do the right thing. I have no suggestions, just wanted to tell you that.
(I regularly drop them at the university's recycling bins... They must be wondering where that stuff is coming from...)

Model companies (or any precision mooulder) will not take post consumer waste for reuse under any circumstances. While we just refer to this stuff as "styrene" or "polystyrene", the stuff used to make kits is actually any one of a thousand specific blends of styrne plus other crap. The other crap makes it flow easier, melt at specific temperatures, cool in specific ways and have specific colours. Polystyrene foam, while chemically very similar, has even further additives to permit the foaming process. The properties needed by a particular moulder are different than those needed or wanted by another and even small amounts of contaminants, like entrapped water vapour or mould release, can really bugger up the moulding process. These guys are hard pressed to actually pump their own waste back into products because of the degradation due to moulding so they never use anyone else's waste.

Any re-use of premade stryene is generally into really low grade products like deck boards or ground fillers for potting soil or the like. It is almost impossible to turn waste plastic back into a higher end usable product. Turning PET bottles into fleece cloth is one of the rare examples where this is possible, but even then there are issues with the quality of the post consumer waste purity.

And then you have to look at the cost. I recently saw a presentation that quoted that a ton of plastic grocery bags costs upwards of $4000 to reclaim from household recycling and can then be sold on the open market for $32. Notwithstanding the price of oil these days, the cost of petrolium products is still ridiculously cheap compared to any manual process for reclaiming it. Recycling plastics makes absolutely no economic sense at all. If you want to "save the environment" and do the responsible thing, don't use plastic in your day-to day life to the maximum extent possible. Reducing is the only way to really make a difference and, lets face it, the plastic kit industry really doesn't make even a blip on the ecological "bad guy" radar for the materials they use, so I wouldn't sweat this particular issue.

Use as much sprue as you can for your own purposes and dispose of the rest responsibly. Even the effort of mailing it to a recycler would cost more and use more oil-based energy than can be recovered from the plastic itself.

Unfortunately, our hobby is simply one that pollutes and there's not much we can do about it short of reducing consumption.

Paul

hello Paul,
very good points.i did not know alot of what you said about the manufactures not wanting any of the sprue's back,but i did find some one that has a use for them.and i will be sending him all my used sprue's.it may cost some in engery use,but it will help a fellow modeler,and not clog a landfill.
where i live i try to recycle all i can,and i encourage all that read this to,like Paul said,recycle and reduce as much as you can.
thanks for pointing out the reasons why manufactures do not want any of the used sprue's.
cheers,
Bruce