American fast food chain Chick-Fil-does not dump customer-used plastic cups in a landfill, but instead turns them into benches.
The process looks very interesting:
Customers first throw their used glasses into a special waste bin.
Then the plastic dishes are sent for pre-processing.
During manual sorting, liquids and waste are removed from the glasses.
After sorting, the dishes are crushed into 2.5-5 cm pieces.
And pressed.
The compressed dishes are sent to a specialized enterprise where they are crushed into very small pieces.
And mixes with other types of recycled plastics.
After that, the plastic particles are melted and the desired parts of the benches are molded into special shapes under pressure.
After cooling, parts of the benches are removed from the molds.
In the assembly shop, holes are drilled for screws.
And then they put the bench together. The end result of this whole process is this nice park bench.
