Two cooperatives funded by Working World, Etilplast and Villa Angelica are examples of small family coop organizations which buy waste plastic and reprocess it to add value to the chain. Villa Angelica has a yard full of waste and two machines which chop up the plastic. When we visited we were told that they had recently lost their only client and were hoping to mend their small extruder to seek new buyers. All the equipment in the yard was priced in terms of the number of tons of plastic waste that they had traded to get them. All these machines were worth less than a few thousand dollars. A more successful organization, Etilplast, had an enormous extruder which they had built themselves over some eight months. All machines there were huge and according to Working World, a little over the top – industrial size machines rather than cottage industry. From our perspective this group seemed as if it could make the hotpress, but how complicated they would make it and how long they would take one could only guess.
[QUICKTIME https://www.wasteforlife.org/movies/villa_angelica.mov 320 196]
[QUICKTIME https://www.wasteforlife.org/movies/etilplast.mov 320 196]