With a little help

Unsurprisingly, a lot of things in a potter's life go better with a little help. Loading a kiln. Unloading a kiln. Setting up shows, or taking them down. Taking turns sitting in the booth at shows, especially those 10-hour long summer days. Sorting pots and taking inventory.

Recycling clay.

Denise usually helps me with all this stuff. She hands me pots to put in the kiln while I'm on the step stool, organizes half the display at Saturday Market, tallies pots on the inventory sheet while I open the boxes. When we recycle clay, I handle input, dividing up scrap and putting it in the hopper. She does output, cutting off pugs, moving them, bagging them. It's a smooth, well-oiled process.

Denise is in Wisconsin for two weeks, helping her parents with house-clearing. And I had to recycle clay.

Didn't have a choice. The drying bat was full, and all the buckets of wet scrap likewise. With winter, nothing was really dry enough, but I emptied out the bat, refilled it with slop. I had to leaving everything out on the table top with the heat on for a couple of days, because it was still too wet to pug after over a month in the bat, but Friday morning, I got everything organized, fired up the mill and had at it.


I've got two sources of clay to recycle: bat clay, wet slop that's been sitting in my drying bat evaporating till it's solid, rather than slurry, and bags of scrap that come from trimmed bottoms during throwing (leather-hard trimmings go in the slop bucket with used throwing water, to dissolve), still-moist clay scraped off of throwing bats. I line a bucket with clay bags, remove and tie them off when they're full. Doing this effectively doubles the amount of clay I can recycle each time without adding more water that'll just have to be dried out again.

The pug mill has a hopper where you force clay in, an auger that mixes and carries the clay through a screen that catches debris and cuts into air pockets so the vacuum pump can remove them. The finished mix extrudes out the nozzle in a long pug that would make Freud--or the average three-year-old--delirious with joy.

I run everything through twice, once just to mix, the second time, with the vacuum pump going, to de-air. On the second pass, I try to stagger firmer pugs from the start of the process with softer, later ones, for a more uniform result. The finished product is bagged up and stored for use on flatware: plates, bakers and pie dishes.

Surprisingly, recycling solo was not that bad. It took longer, true, but was a little easier on my arms and shoulders, because I took more breaks, moved around more. This was an average batch, about 300 lbs, and I was done in under two hours.

Things I wish I could recycle

Clay bags and twist ties.

I get my clay pre-mixed, wet, because I simply can't mix and age my own from dry materials. I haven't the room nor time nor manpower. But I wind up with two cardboard boxes, four bags and four twist ties for every 100 lbs. I throw.

The boxes I reuse for shipping, or flatten and recycle. The bags and ties… pile up.

Sure, I use some when I recycle--21 bags last time--but after I use up the recycled clay, the bags still remain. Denise takes some for used cat litter, but two cats just don't extrude that much. And no recycler will take them.

I wish I had a solution. I stuff bags full of bags until I trip over them, then throw them out with a guilty conscience. I suppose wire twist ties could go in the recycle, but there's so little metal in them, I wonder if it's worthwhile.