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Smile Plastics
Colin Williamson
http://www.smile-plastics.co.uk
SmilePlas@aol.com
I have been involved in plastics recycling for many years and have travelled extensively in third world developing economy countries looking at waste.

Our system of making sheets is reliant on high pressure and high temperatures and, as a plastics technologist, I don't think it is the way to go forwards. I once headed a project in Costa Rica to find uses for all the plastics waste generated there. We came up with three low tech (by our standards) solutions, all of which worked and one of which would be applicable to lower tech places. However, they still require some technology.

I approach such problems by including whatever facilities there are locally. My trips to India suggest that they have a surfeit of low cost, low skill people which we in the west do not have. We solve our plastics recycling problems with technology and lots of electrical energy but no manpower, they solve theirs with little technology, little energy but with lots of manpower.

The major initial problems in making something useful out of plastics waste are separating the different types and removing contamination - very low tech and labour intensive. So, lets do that first and generate sorted relatively clean waste, lets say of polyethylene film or sheeting. Then, to make something useful from this material needs a bit of technology. You could press them together to make a larger sheet, but this is not easy. I would prefer the solution we used in Costa Rica with old banana bags. An old plastics extruder was obtained from a scrap yard - there are thousands of such extruders in India, every long established plastic film company has got several in their yard. We used an old tractor to drive it - very low power is required, and burning wood to heat it. The result was melted plastic in a state that could be very low tech moulded into something useful - in this case plastic buckets that were sold to the construction industry because you could drop them from the top of scaffolding and they didn't ever break - they lasted for ever !

So, I don't think my method is as low tech as you are looking for, but it works and on a community level might be achievable. In India, levels of plastics recycling are very high because they treat waste as a commodity, not a problem as we in Europe do.

Hope this is of interest
cheers
Colin Williamson