Shred.
Extrude.
Inject.
Use.
Repeat.
I
t’s a recycling process that New Albany entrepreneur
and philanthropist David Gramlin hopes might someday
change the world. The material is tossed-out plastic. The
machines — a shredder, an extruder, an injector and a sheet
press — are made by his hands. And the ultimate goal is to
greatly reduce the amount of plastics in the world’s landfills
and oceans.
“I think one of the biggest misconceptions people have about
plastic is that it’s one-time use, to be thrown away,” said Gram-
lin. “A plastic bottle can be broken down, reformed and turn into
something that’s more useful than the bottle itself.”
Gramlin constructed his recycling machines using blueprints
he downloaded for free from an open-source collective of recy-
cling entrepreneurs called Precious Plastic. He uses The Root
coworking space in New Albany as a collection point for his
plastics, and LVL1 hackerspace in Louisville as his home base.
“He’s just a jump-in-with-both-feet kind of guy, so it’s good
to be around,” said Tiffany Haynie, secretary of the Board of
Directors at LVL1 and fellow recycling enthusiast, who coinci-
dentally was working on a shredder for Precious Plastic when
she met Gramlin. “I asked him, ‘What are you working on? And
he said, ‘I’m going to save the world!’”
Gramlin described his plastic-recycling process much like
working with Play-Doh. “You take a water bottle, and when you
shred it down you now have little flakes,” he said. “When you
put it through the extruder, you’re heating it up to its melting
point. And by the time it comes out it’s almost the consistency
of Play-Doh, if not softer.” That material is then injected into a
mold where it forms an object once cooled.
Gramlin is currently using his machines to help fight the
coronavirus outbreak by rapid prototyping and testing parts for
face masks and respirators — both essential for the country’s
overtaxed healthcare workers. “I chose the respirators because
many hospitals only had a limited supply to begin with,” he
said. “When the COVID-19 started spreading exponentially
they were not prepared for it. They needed a way to rapid-proto-
type parts to find the most simple and easy way to mass produce
parts for the respirator.”
INSPIRATION FROM BOREDOM
Innovator David Gramlin, taking a break at LVL1, a
“hackerspace” in Louisville’s Butchertown neighborhood.
Gramlin is using simple machines and recycled plastics
to rapid prototype and test parts for N95 masks and
respirators, doing his part to battle the coronavirus.
Gramlin’s passion for recycling grew out of sheer boredom.
His job as a controls engineer early in his career required exten-
sive travel, where many days on job sites around the country
meant many nights in hotels. During those hours, he started
to brainstorm his path to a bigger purpose. And he landed on
practical uses for recycling. “There are islands of trash in the
oceans, trash all over the place. People don’t know what to do
with it,” he said. “It got me wanting to do something more. It’s
a cliche, but engineers are set to solve all the world’s problems.”
His research led him all the way to Ghana, where the city of
Agbobloshie is considered the most toxic on the planet. What he
found there was an overwhelming struggle with trash — specifi-
cally plastics — that led the city’s residents to throw out their
junk however and wherever they wanted, creating huge piles
that they would burn simply because they had no other way
May / June 2020
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