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 stock 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 their machines with the same pressure for every cycle. Sure this way is slower, but it works great for recycled plastic shred. The aluminium mould cools the plastic almost instantly, meaning we can demould straight away. Some colourways need polishing, but Blue Galaxy pops out of the mould nicely and just needs the excess trimming off, which of course, all gets saved and reused. Our 11mm recycled plastic buttons are available to buy on our website in any of our 9 custom colourways, or as assorted packs. 🪡 #ecofriendly #sustainablefashion #greatbritishsewingbee #buttonsbuttonsbuttons #cleanupchallenge #brothersmake #plasticrecycling #recycledplastic