How Recycled Plastic Buttons Are Made

We’ve been making a butt-ton of buttons recently, so we thought we’d take you guys along for the ride and show you how our injection moulding process looks. Everything starts with the source plastic. This colourway is called ‘Blue Galaxy’ and is made up of blue milk bottle tops, purple water bottle tops and white shampoo bottles. We pre-weigh the plastic and load it into the hopper. Since all our plastic stick is recycled, different colours behave differently in the machine. This batch needed 8 minutes to fully soften until we could inject into the mould. We always pre-heat our moulds in our repurposed oven as this helps to improve the flow of plastic in the mould as well as the surface finish. Once the mould is warm and the plastic has melted, we clamp the mould in place and turn the injection wheel by hand. Doing it this way gives us a feel for when the mould is full. Mass production plastic moulding companies like the repeatability and predictability of virgin plastic, as they can program the