Recycling Scrap Pottery Clay

Video Transcript

"In this clip we're going to take a look at clay recycling as it relates to the clay mixing process because you may have opportunities to mix batches of raw clay from scratch like we've seen already in this series. But, more often than not, you're going to need to recycle clay that you've already used. A lot of times we generate scrap when we're working on the wheel, trimming excess material off of the bottoms of our pots, or if we have failed attempts, like this bowl right here for instance. So, we can as long as the clay hasn't been fired, it can be reconstituted to a workable consistency again, but there's a few key points to this. If you have a chunk of clay that has started to dry out already, it's lost some of its moisture but not all of it, that's called leather hard. And, you can see this kind of cheese-like consistency here. It's stiff, but it's not soft enough to work with, but it's not completely dry like this. This is called bone dry, and you can see it's extremely brittle and fragile. Now, when the clay is leather hard, it still has a significant amount of moisture in it and the bone dry clay has no moisture in it so, thus, the clay is really porous. So the easiest way to reconstitute the clay is to let it dry out completely and then put it into a scrap bucket, like this one, full of water, and that will disintegrate the clay, it'll kind of immediately turns back to a slushy mush consistency. And, then we use the same process that we used before to lay it out on the plaster bats and allow it to lose the excess moisture and then reconstitute it to the consistency we want it to be at to work with. If you put a leather hard chunk like this, I just pulled this out of the recycling bin, this is got, this is way too stiff to work with and it's got a lot of moisture in it so it's not porous. It just takes forever for this to absorb enough excess moisture to get it soft enough to re-wedge or to run through the Pugmill. And, if we let it dry out completely it will just instantaneously turn back to mush and that makes it a lot easier to do the recycling process."