Crash and Impact Barriers from Plastic Trash

We can solve two problems at once by using plastic bags, ‘film,’ water bottles, and jugs to make crash barriers for all sorts of purposes, starting with highway and various race courses.

• Plastic bags, such as stores and newspaper wrappers
• Those plastic bags used inside cardboard cereal boxes. This tough stuff and most other hard-to-recycle thin plastic are collectively called ‘film’ by the industry.
• Single-use water bottles and milk jugs.

Put all of this stuff together in a big bag and I’m betting I could jump off of a two-story roof into it and not get hurt at all. All of the very thin stuff is called ‘film’ in the industry, and it has has an incredible capacity to reduce impact speed. The bags inside cereal, and water bottles seem to have an irrepressible memory that is extremely difficult to permanently flatten.

I call on the teachers of the world to make a student project out of this, creating drives to collect the material, test various impacts, and devise ways to make a cell structure out of the various media, so that the softest and stiffest stay together instead of separating.

I would love to see an automobile run into a huge pile of plastic trash. I’ll bet it could eliminate all damage up to 15 km per hour.