Recycle Trash into 3D Printer Filament?

[redrick]

When do you guys thing this will be common place? For instance, instead of putting your plastic bottles in the garbage or recycling bin, you can throw it into the 3d printer, which melts it down and turns in into free filament. That bottle could become the next toy for your child, or tool around the house.

[3dman]

I think this is something that would be awesome. However, I'm not sure any of these major companies are all that excited about spending their R&D money on trying to figure out how to print using trash. These companies make money off of selling Filament, thus if you could print with plastic bottles they wouldn't be making as much money.

In actuality, companies could probably allow plastic (garbage) to be fed into a machine based on the Plastic Recycle codes on the item.

You have all seen these. They look like this:


This tells recycling companies what type of plastic it is.

The 3d Printers could allow for certain size feets (for example 3X6 sheets) to be fed into the printer, as long as they are of the correct plastic (recycling code). I don't see why this wouldn't work, and perhaps someone will come up with the idea soon.

As for other garbage, I wouldn't be surprised to see this utilized in the future. Perhaps even molecular breakdown.

[3dman]

Actually there is something already out via Kickstarter, called the Filastruder, which extracts filament from plastic bottles, beads, etc.



Apparently they have already shipped 700 of these awesome machines so far (see http://www.filastruder.com/). This could really be the future of 3D Printing!
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...ament-extruder

Also, it only sells for $250. Well worth the cost if you plan on printing a lot of stuff.

[redrick]

We likely will see the consumer 3D printing business trend the same way that the regular printer business went. Cheaper printers, more expensive filament. Having said this, we have so many more independent companies, and diy'ers this time around as compared to the late 90's and early 2000's, so eventually plastic filament prices will significantly drop. Thanks 3dman for the links. This is exactly what i was looking for!

[Marcus]

Yes, exciting ideas out there, I was close to back one of the many plastic grind/extrude projects...
But it really doesn't work for me, as I did not not have a place in the apartment to set something up like this.
The other issue is plastic quality; first off there are different material compositions, and then the extrusion has to be precice ands with consistent density. Of course the 1,73mm UP extruder is more picky then my Printrbot's 3mm extruder... ;-)

But some ABS has an ideal melting point of 230 degree Celsius, some 260 degree... If different scraps get ground and mixed together, I would imagine the print results would be pretty bad.

At 20 euro per Kilogram that's a lot of plastic you need to recycle in order to save a bit of money, but yes, from an enviromental point of view the base idea is great.
There are so many innovative ideas out there, I am sure we will see more people recycling soon.
Though I wonder how enviroment friendly it is on a household-scale to wash, grind and melt a few pounds of plastic compared to recycling on a large scale.
On the other hand, a lot of plastic gets burned as it is either in the wrong trash bin or just impossible to sort.
Some products consist of three diferent plastics pressed, sealed or injected together... We would need a law against that :-)
Recently I have seen a report of a laser scanning machine that will scan grounded plastic particles and recognize it's type and color, sorting these difficult plastic container hybrids.
This will help to recycle plastics in the future, and help avoid more and more trash.

One thing I would find even more interesting would be some sort of PLA desktop factory, able to produce plastic from common components (starch or something) and easily available chemicals or bacteria.
Who knows what ideas some people will come up with next.

[MartinPoets]

The easiest recycling will be of items that are printed in Plastic Filament. You can pretty much just melt it down put it back into it's standard size and reuse it. However, it gets trickier when you want to start using everyday products like plastic water bottles, and other plastic recyclables.

Recycling metal can be tricky, because of the alloys in each metal, and different temperatures that certain metals melt at.

Then it gets to be really tricky trying to recycle ceramics, wood, etc.

One day we will be there, but I don't think it will be until 3D printing has fully taken off, and some large companies with plenty of money can start researching ways to make recyclable filament, and machines that can extract materials that can be used to print with.

[MysteryAlabaster]

The Filabot was something on Kickstarter last year, it featured a grinder and an extruder so you could recycle mis-prints and use bottles and other plastics.

Sadly, they still have yet to get the grinder working correctly, and as far as I know, there is no other similar unit either in production or for sale.
The main feature that I would be looking for would be the grinder. I would rather just grind up printed supports and things that didn't come out well as opposed to buy plastic pellets and have all my supports and botched prints go to waste.
This is a major problem with ABS plastic compared to PLA because PLA is plant-based and will biodegrade over time. ABS is artificial and will not, so throwing away prints made with ABS is eventually going to cause a problem for the environment.

[Riskerbus]

Mystery, here is one just like Filabot, but seemingly more sophisticated: http://3dprintboard.com/showthread.p...ment-Filamaker

Call Filamaker. This is the future of 3D Printing. Cheap filament will make paying the price for a 3D Printer well worth it. Recycling at it's best!

[MysteryAlabaster]

Mystery, here is one just like Filabot, but seemingly more sophisticated: http://3dprintboard.com/showthread.p...ment-Filamaker

Call Filamaker. This is the future of 3D Printing. Cheap filament will make paying the price for a 3D Printer well worth it. Recycling at it's best!

From what I saw on the video I found, all they have is the grinder. Now, if the two groups 'Filamaker' and 'Filabot' would work together, maybe we can get somewhere. But until then, I stand by what I said, being that Filabot has come the closest.

[Maggie]

From what I saw on the video I found, all they have is the grinder. Now, if the two groups 'Filamaker' and 'Filabot' would work together, maybe we can get somewhere. But until then, I stand by what I said, being that Filabot has come the closest.

Instead of just having two smaller companies work together, it would be nice to see a larger company that is already established in the industry create a filament recyling machine. Why doesn't MakerBot create one?