In the year 2019, the global management of plastic waste depicted a distribution where 9% underwent recycling, 19% was subject to incineration, approximately 50% found its way to landfills, while 22% was either openly burned, disposed in unsanitary dumpsites, or inadvertently released into the environment. The challenge of plastic waste is a reflection of global environmental injustice; a substantial portion of this waste is disproportionately directed to Southeast Asia.

PLA emerged as an alternative to petrochemical-based plastics, advertised as one of the most promising environmentally friendly materials for a sustainable bio-economy, owing to its biosynthetic capability and biodegradability. However, marketing PLA as a biodegradable polymer can be misleading to consumers who might assume that PLA will naturally break down in landfills. In reality, PLA is compostable, but only under specific conditions according to the ASTM International D5338-15 standard, which requires an indicative temperature of 58 ± 5 °C. This characteristic renders PLA resistant to degradation under typical landfill conditions, necessitating industrial composting at elevated temperatures, which, in turn, demands specialized infrastructure and significant energy consumption. In response to this challenge, a recycling process has been proposed. The primary objective is to curtail the environmental impact associated with the conversion and end-of-life stages. This recycling process introduces the possibility of recycling PLA waste, thereby fostering the closure of the material loop.

The apparatus was conceived as a device that enables reusing or decomposing PLA in a non-industrial setting. As an alternative to decomposing PLA, which consumes considerable energy and releases greenhouse gas during the process, the mechanism focuses on recycling to retain the material value of plastic waste. The apparatus leverages solar power to reduce energy consumption. The sequence of operations starts with grinding scraps into finer pieces. They are then placed in the mold and covered with a heating plate to evenly distribute the heat. Once the pieces reach a viscous state from converged solar beams, the heated plate will be removed and the mold is slid into the pressing station for shape-forming.