recycling 3D printing materials
Update: see Joe’s comment below with information about an open source filament extruder/recycler. Thanks Joe!
If you haven’t yet, check out this great blog post on recycling of 3D printing materials by i.materialise’s Joris Peels:
Last week in a comment, Paul asked me, “When will more eco and sustainable materials be available for use in these printers? Something like hemp plastic or other biodegradable materials? What are the technical limitations and who is working on them?” His question was a bit too big for a comment so I’m trying to answer it here. Below I outline, very broadly, four mayor developments in recycling and 3D printing. These developments are: recycling existing 3D printing materials, using materials that are already recycled as 3D printing materials, bioplastics & recycling on location.
Good post, I have been holding off on doing any printing because of this. However there are times when plastics are the best for what ever one is doing especially when making sculpture, it will last forever!, but I digress. There are a few people working with clay, and concrete, sugar, ect.
One thing, since most recycling depots only take certain plastics based on the plastic recycling codes one would have to add a plastic code on their 3D print as to inform the recyclers what type of plastic it is, or else it just gets tipped. At least in my neck of the woods.
http://www.ides.com/resources/plastic-recycling-codes.asp
Cheers
E
I love the clay, concrete, sugar stuff. Would also like to see some paper pulp added to the mix…
Yes, great reminder, recycler codes are also used in Europe. Let’s get in the habit of adding them to our 3D printed plastic objects.
Thanks Erika!
Just wanted to add a little open source nugget to this;
There is already a viable option (in prototype form) for plastic regrinding at home and extruding filament either as a unit or in two steps, it’s called filabot (currently the wee/small version is already published)
The creative team has collaborated with OSE’s GVCS, you can see it here
Extruder
http://www.youtube.com/user/Filabot/videos
Grinder
http://www.youtube.com/user/thymark/videos
Official site
http://filabot.com/
and they have a kickstarter project(ended) – just search filabot
As far as I have been able to find this is the most promising for in-home recycling.
Now if we could find an open source injection molding machine for home use it would be golden. -Joe
just adding one more, now a realities
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/833191773/filastruder-a-robust-inexpensive-filament-extruder