After spending about an hour by the side of the road with our broken down car, we got back on the road, and headed to the area of Conejos and Tula in the state of Hidalgo. We went to visit Eloy's plastic granulating (this is the official term - it's basically plastic grinding/shredding) business.
Eloy bought the machine to do this business about a year ago for 130,000 pesos. He needs to produce 7-8 tons per week in order to break even, but his guys are only producing 3-4 per week. This means that he has to put an extra 25-30,000 pesos per month to keep the business alive. He is a computer programmer by trade, but wanted a business, so that's the reason he invested. He lives in Mexico City, and his business is from 1-2 hours away depending on the traffic. He is really not sure what to do, so he was pretty excited to get our feedback.
The outside of the property.
A very large bag of plastic.
There are two types of plastic they process - PET and HDP. This is an unprocessed pile of HDP plastic.
This is one of his managers (and his son). You can also see the truck they use to go get the plastic from the landfills.
This is their trailer that is also used to get plastic. You'll notice that there is nothing going on here. We arrived, and there were 3 people sitting there doing nothing.
This is the granulator.
A bad picture that was supposed to show the inside of the machine.
Another shot of the machine.
This is what the finished product looks like.
They're taking the machine apart to show us the blades it uses.
Here you can see the blades (and that they recently did a load of green plastic).
The bottom is sort of a cheese-grater-like plate.
Nate with one of the bags they use to transport the unprocessed plastic.
A full bag.
The following photos were provided by Eloy:
This is what the business should look like (not empty).
The machine in action.
The processed chips are put into these bags - about 35 bags is equal to a ton.
You'll see in the video below, but this can be a very dangerous job.
A stack of finished product.
A few pretty cool videos of Eloy's recycling business that he provided.
Here's another video showing the process.
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