Thanks again gain for your reply. Very helpful indeed. The original idea was to just buy a shredder and send off the shredded material to a company to use the flakes and produce a product probably through injection mold that I could then sell to the tourists on our island. On a recent trip to Taiwan I saw a few 3D printers and thought it would be cool for the customer to see their purchase being made in front of their own eyes and hopefully inspiring them to see the value in recycled plastic waste and return maybe a few would take the idea home with them and try to clean up some of the seemingly value less waste lying around their part of the world. I guess I need to do a lot more research into the process of recycling abs plastics. Nonetheless the end game would be to recycle and produce all myself in one closed system. Again I really appreciate your extremely honest and helpful feedback!



Quote Originally Posted by awerby View Post
3D printing filament is probably the highest-value product you could hope to make with your recycled fishing floats. So it makes sense that you'd want to produce it, and sell it to those people who feel bad about all the plastic waste we're generating collectively, and want to be part of the solution. But you have to understand that 3D printing filament is also probably the most demanding use any thermoplastic is ever put to, and that it already fails frequently in normal use from mysterious causes that people here on this forum are used to pondering at length. Adding the odd particles of shell, algae and sand just doesn't seem like it's going to help.

On the other hand, if it were easy, someone would have done it already. I don't want to discourage you altogether, but just to let you know what you're up against. If you come up with an effective pre-cleaning process, a way to filter out impurities and dehydrate your melted plastic batches, and could put it up into hermetically-sealed packaging, then sure - I suppose it could work, especially if you went for large-diameter filament that's less likely to choke on the occasional particle. It just seems that just about any other product you could make would be a lot easier to satisfy customers with.

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com