recycling PET plastic safely in molds for project?

[Michael Timm]

Wondering if anyone in this group has ideas/suggestions or would be interested in discussing/supporting an effort to melt plastic and form it into components for a game using custom molds. 

It's not clear to me how safely this can be done (due to fumes) but perhaps folks in this group have ideas or experience. 

The purpose is to support a next generation of custom board game components. A few years ago I Kickstarted a board game, Mussel Madness (https://www.matimm.com/mussel-madness.html), and am looking with my colleagues at the nonprofit Reflo if we can issue a version 2.0 of this game that would be easier to produce for those who are interested beyond the Kickstarter version. 

The version that exists uses PET egg cartons as "lake basins" and these actually work wonderful for the purposes of the gameplay (transparent, lightweight, good size, have wells to hold other components) but are prohibitive for fitting nicely into a conventional game box and are just a tad too DIY for the look/feel that would be ideal to communicate that these components represent the Great Lakes were we to scale this to another local production run. 

My colleagues are pretty crafty and we're looking into some options, but assembling alternates from custom-cut acrylic (our next step) is likely to be too expensive and too heavy than ideal. 

I have tons of stockpiled transparent PET egg cartons that didn't get used with the initial run. In an ideal universe I would love to experiment with melting these into molds and evaluating what that kind of custom-shaped "Lake" component could look/feel like. But I haven't done this before and I am leery of the toxicity risk of experimenting on my own in a toaster oven or equivalent. If anyone has thoughts or interest/experience/warnings/advice, feel free to reach out. 

Thanks, and Happy New Year!

[Anna Kirch]

Hey!  We've been talking about this for a bit.  I was trying to come up with a toaster oven enclosed I'm a box with a water filter and carbon filter to take fumes out.  I just haven't gotten around to it.  

I was attempting it with PLA.  I would start there

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[Don Rozwick]

Michael,

  If you haven't already looked then check out  A Big Bang for Plastic Recycling (preciousplastic.com).  I have followed them for a while and have a shredder.   I did have an extruder but took that apart.  I do everything in the detached garage for some form of safety.

-Don Rozwick

He who slings mud generally loses ground.

   Adlai Stevenson

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[Michael Timm]

I wanted to thank the folks who shared ideas on this thread. I will investigate. Happy New Year!