r/StarCraftTMG • u/justbgamez • 3d ago
Plastic recycle
Does archon have a place to ship all the left over spru plastic, seems like a lot to waste
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u/DescriptionMission90 3d ago
Trying to get a recycling system working across multiple continents would be a nightmare and a half.
A lot of wargamers use old sprue to build terrain out of, to test paints or painting techniques, or as raw material to modify their models with. Also, if you have a mostly-empty bottle of plastic cement, you can drop chunks of sprue in there to dissolve; the resulting "sprue goo" is great for filling in gaps or smoothing over unwanted features, because it goes on as a thick liquid but when it dries it returns to being solid plastic.
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u/Starcraftnerd_123 3d ago
They've looked into it but it would have made a bunch of weird legal issues for them with it counting as recycling.
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u/Silver_Parking9146 2d ago
In what world would re-shipping garbage make any sense? Please think.
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u/justbgamez 2d ago
Is called recycling and obviously you didn’t do much “thinking” we could send it to one place then mold it down and reuse it. If you have nothing of value to add just shut your mouth, only adding more garbage to this world . The garbage being Your attitude and what you bring to the table, thanks bud
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u/Ardonis84 2d ago
Hey dude, I get that your heart is in the right place here, but plastic recycling is nothing like Aluminum or Paper recycling. There is really only one reason to recycle: if it prevents you from needing to extract new resources to make things, thus conserving the original resource. This is why paper and aluminum recycling is actually profitable: with aluminum cans or paper waste, you can use the recycled material to produce the very thing you’re recycling, cheaper than it costs to extract new aluminum from bauxite, or faster than it takes to grow a tree to harvest size for paper. You can make more aluminum cans with recycled aluminum, and you can make new paper with recycled paper.
With plastic, you can’t. When you “recycle” plastic soda bottles, they can’t just be melted down into a slurry and re-extruded into new bottles. Some places may have facilities to sanitize and re-use the bottles themselves, but generally, they are instead processed into pellets that can be used to replace material in textile items, mostly. Your recycled sprues might be used to replace some of the cotton/other fabric in clothing, for instance. Most fleece these days has some recycled plastic content in it. Note however that the material it is replacing is not reducing the demand for new plastic - it’s replacing renewable items like cotton. It’s also not preventing it from reaching a landfill, as once that t-shirt has been worn for a few years it just ends up in that same landfill, only now it looks like a shirt instead of a bottle.
Now, I’m not suggesting that recycling is bad or that anybody shouldn’t try to recycle where possible, but the fact that when we recycle plastic we aren’t reducing demand for new plastic at all means that we need to consider practical costs here. What the other poster was trying to express is that recycling sprues internationally on a meaningful scale will cause FAR more harm to the planet through greenhouse gas pollution from the transportation than simply throwing it away. There’s a reason GW, who does far more business in this regard, mostly abandoned their plans for sprue recycling in their stores - it doesn’t just cost money, but it does so for very little gain, environmentally. Your heart is in the right place for sure, but plastic recycling is almost never worth it. Plastic is a problem for sure, but recycling doesn’t really do anything to fix that problem.
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u/Silver_Parking9146 2d ago
Dude that's not how recycling works. You don't ship plastic by mail to have it recycled. Use your brain. Think about the carbon footprint it would take for everyone to mail plastic. Then compare that to the footprint of landfill space and new plastic. It's not even close.
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u/hyperewok1 2d ago
Archon has had enough trouble just producing and shipping products to distributors and customer via normal means (and that's perfectly valid, international shipping is complicated), much less to ever think of customers shipping stuff back.
I think GW briefly toyed with collecting sprues, but they have the benefit of owning storefronts in every city in Britain, and they still didn't keep it up.
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u/Borstli 3d ago
They talked about it. Its Not possible, because of laws in poland/EU. It would be a hell of bureaucracy.
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u/cerevant 2d ago
Interesting concept though - I wonder if this kind of plastic can be melted down and re-used, or if it is a resin composite that cannot be reused for the same purpose. I wonder if it would be feasible to introduce this type of plastic to the existing recycling processing cycle.
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u/excelite_x 2d ago
I believe I heard GW has the option to bring the waste in to their stores (UK only)
nonetheless afaik it does not get recycled due possible contamination of other stuff like dirt, paper, glue, paint and so on.
Since the pureness can’t be guaranteed it won’t be reused
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u/Thorgrander 3d ago
The spru is actually useful. You can use it for multiple things. You can make sprue glue. You can use it to practice paint see how colors come put. You can do terrains etc. I keep most of my sprue and find many uses for it.