A Paul Kane graduate is turning plastic trash into new products with the help of volunteers at the University of Alberta.
Paul Kane graduate and U of A student Autumn Borsellino spoke with the Gazette last week about her work at Level 7 Plastics, a plastics recycling and manufacturing company at the university. She is the company’s lab director.
Level 7 takes single-use plastic waste and uses volunteers and engineering know-how to turn it into artsy objects, Borsellino said. This includes paintings, wall-mounted training grips for climbers, and, as of this month, furniture.
“We’re taking broken old chairs and repurposing the frames and making new seat portions and backrests out of our plastic,” she said.
Plastic problems
Borsellino said she joined Level 7 two years ago as a volunteer after hearing about it from friend and company co-founder Connor Povoledo.
Povoledo, who is studying biomedical engineering at the U of A, said he got the idea for Level 7 after seeing crews manually sorting plastic waste at the Edmonton Waste Management Centre. (The group’s name refers to the seven resin identification codes printed inside recycling symbols found on most plastic items.)
“It’s very difficult to sort plastics,” Povoledo said, especially the massive amounts in municipal waste.
A plastic object like a Tide container might contain several different types of plastic, assuming they are labelled at all, Povoledo said. Because fresh plastic is so cheap, its rarely economical to sort, clean and process used plastic.
The result is a tidal wave of trash, with about 87 per cent of Canada’s plastic waste ending up in landfills or the environment, a 2019 Environment Canada study found.
Level 7 gets around this with point-source sorting, Povoledo said. By collecting single-use plastic waste directly from labs and companies, many of which use large numbers of identical products (such as syringes), their crews get large amounts of easy-to-sort items that are made of just a few known resin types — important, as not all resins can be bound together.
Povoledo said Level 7 started out in a garage in southwest Edmonton, then moved to the Peas on Earth farm in Sturgeon County before coming to the U of A last September. It now has about 25 volunteers and can process up to a quarter-million bottles worth of plastic a year.
Waste to wood
Borsellino said she oversees Level 7’s manufacturing process, where volunteers sort and clean plastic waste before shredding it. The shredded plastic then runs through custom-made injectors, presses, and extruders to produce fasteners, paintings, lumber and other products.
Plastic lumber is much stronger than wood and can be used to replace anything made out of two-by-fours or plywood, Povoledo noted.
“This table?” he said, tapping a large wooden surface in the Level 7 lab.
“If we could make it out of plastic and wrap it in a veneer, there’s no reason we couldn’t recycle like 6,000 bottles.”
While Level 7’s point-source sorting might not be practical for household waste, Povoledo said it could work well for companies or hospitals, which often use vast amounts of single-use plastic items made out of specific resins.
“If you have good point-source collection, you will not have the dispersion [of plastics] into rivers and landfills,” he said.
Borsellino said she’s had plenty of students step up to volunteer for Level 7, and has enjoyed opening their eyes to the hands-on realities of manufacturing.
“Knowing we’re doing something good for the community and for plastic waste in general feels good.”
Anyone interested in working with Level 7 should email [email protected].
