Recycling - A better view of what it is all about

You can imagine that in today economical climate it is increasingly difficult to keep a non profit organisation going.  We started the Mission nearly 16 years ago and from the get go we had to work very hard to get the Mission self sustained.  One of our main source of income is a recycling job creation program.

More than 3 years ago Kobus Jacobs found out that an entire plastics extrusion plant is going to be sold on auction.  He went with the goal of just obtaining a granulation machine. This machine takes huge pieces of polypropylene plastic (found in dashboards, bumpers and other components in the car industry) and chops it up into little pieces. As the auction progressed we ended up buying the whole extrusion plant and granulator. If one of the components were bought up by the many scrap metal dealers on the auction it would make what he bid on worthless. That was miracle no 1.

 The extruder

When we tried to get the plant running we found that the electrical cables that we have on the property cannot carry enough KVA so everything came to a standstill.  Approximately 3 months later a large cable company arrived at the Mission with a huge roll of cable on the load body...it was a donation.  That was miracle no 2.  As you can imagine with each breakthrough came another stumbling block.  In our case it was that the owners of the property where we wanted to put up the machines were not prepared to give us more KVA on the property.  So our dream was put on hold for more than two years.

Now for the good news.  We found a warehouse where we could put up the extrusion plant quite near to the Mission.  Better news was that the length of cable that was donated was just long enough to take the electricity supply from where the cable enters the premises to where the machines are set up.  Months later the plant was up and running and I am going to show you what is being done there.

This is what the product looks like that we get from the motor industry:

and this:

from here....

....it gets put through the granulator:

...and are transformed to this....

granulated plastics that is still too large to be put into the extruder.

Now it is put through another granulator that makes smaller granules.

...that look like this.

Now comes the exciting part:

The granulated plastic is put into the inlet to the extruder.

In the yellow part the plastics get melted down.  You can see the steam above it.

The black spaghetti like strands are the melted plastic that now goes through a cooling process in a water bath.

It comes out on the other side of the bath hardened.

It then feeds into the pelletizer.

The final product that is then sold to companies who do plastic injection moulding.

We are just so excited that we are moving on and that the product that this Mission Station produces can be compared to any other professional company out there.  It excites us to know that God is our sole provider.  He has shut doors that He didn't want us to go through and He opened the ones that He wanted us to go through.We are thankful that the Mission can take care of more than 500 people without the help of government or grants.