Printing with Garbage

Quick disclosure, posting this on behalf of my startup ReDeTec. Yesterday we became (as far as we know) the first people in the world to 3D print with dirty recycled coffee cup lids. The print didn't come out too great but as a very first try it's pretty promising looking...certainly better than the first print we ever did with PLA! For videos, details, etc check out our Indiegogo campaign at igg.me/at/ProtoCycler and see the most recent updates. We've love to hear everyone's feedback, and suggestions on how to print with GPPS better...we're having issues with first layer adhesion as you can tell from the print (the first layer had horrible bed adhesion so it both ruined the first few layers of the print, and caused the print to fail when it separated at ~70%). I couldn't seem to attach the pictures, upload kept failing, but they're on the campaign page too - check it out!

Thanks everyone :)

Saw that a bit earlier today myself (I'm enthusiastically backing this project as much as I can afford despite it being on IGG.) I actually thought it was pretty brave of them to show the experiment even though the results were (to put it nicely) imperfect. Polystyrene is a bad material to print with from every reference I can find, it took some serious balls for you guys to even try it.

That said... Try polypropylene next, I have an embarrassment of 64oz convenience store drink cups that I held onto thinking I'd be able to recycle them into filament... It turns out the were not PET as I'd thought but polypropylene, which I can't find even a shred of evidence about using as filament.

You folks are doing good work, and the machine looks awesome (though a long way from done so far).