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cm0002@piefed.social

The 'ExtrudeX' machine wants to turn your 3D printing waste into reusable filament, all at home — this Kickstarter project is itself 3D-printable with minimal hardware costs (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 2 months ago by cm0002@literature.cafe to c/3dprinting@piefed.social

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We live in a time where 3D printing has become so accessible that the waste it generates as a byproduct is now of concern. Building projects are easier than ever, but often supports or failed attempts pile up in the trash and end up going to some landfill instead of being recycled. But what if you could actually recycle all that filament? It's not a novel concept; large-scale extrusion machines already exist, but they're expensive — that's what the ExtrudeX aims to change with its Kickstarter campaign.

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[–] NaibofTabr 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's nice to see more projects in this area, but there have been many others. Heck, the venerable Filastruder launched its Kickstarter in 2013. The Lyman / Mulier extruder design is still available on Thingiverse (for free).

Considering that the ExtrudeX kit doesn't include hardware, only STL files and a list of needed parts, the price point is hardly compelling. Selling commercial licenses for what effectively amounts to nothing but the plastic body is a bad joke. Also, it's hard to tell from the provided pictures, but it looks like this design lacks any filtration for the melted plastic (the extruder is a rotating metal screw inside a metal tube - there will be shaved off metal bits coming off of it into the melted plastic that you really don't want going into your filament).

In any case, extruding filament from finely shredded bits isn't the difficult or expensive part of recycling 3D print waste at home. Shredding it in the first place is. Breaking down plastic objects into small pieces is really very difficult and requires an almost cartoonish amount of torque, which is why all of the machines available for doing this are expensive. Also, if you want to get decent quality output you have to be careful about how you process the material (sort it, shred it, clean it, dry it). Any mixed plastic types (e.g. that one PETG benchy you printed awhile back and forgot that you threw in with your other PLA waste) or foreign material (bits of metal from the shredder, random hairs because you're not working in a clean room, that one part that you forgot you glued together, a threaded insert you forgot to take out, etc) is going to jam up and possibly damage your equipment.

The ExtrudeX project only gives a brief nod to this in the FAQ:

Do I need a shredder or special grinder for the waste?

You do not need a big industrial shredder. You only need to break your waste into small pieces that can fit into the hopper and move through the screw. This can be done with simple tools or a basic home grinder, as long as the pieces are not too large.

Right... you "only need to break your waste into small pieces" that can fit down what appears to be a 1cm tube. Best of luck doing that by hand.

If you want a realistic idea of how difficult the whole process really is, watch Stefan's (CNC Kitchen) videos that I've linked above and/or watch Jonathan's (The Next Layer) attempt to build a 3D print recycling system (he's sunk 21 months and thousands of dollars into it).

[–] Peppycito@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This just goes to show you how unrecycleable plastic is. There's also Precious Plastic which has been trying to create a grassroots recycling industry for years.

[–] NaibofTabr 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This just goes to show you how unrecycleable plastic is.

It is difficult, but... I think the amount of projects related to this goes to show that it is doable, it's just complicated. Doing it on the individual home level might never be particularly cost-effective.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I was a member of a fairly large makerspace, and we thought doing communal recycling would make the equipment worth it. We never made it work.

[–] NaibofTabr 1 points 18 hours ago

I've thought about this several times. A makerspace seems like an ideal way to do this on the face of it - collect from the community, not just one person, and have the processing equipment at a shared location, and then you can have the recycled material at the makerspace for members to use for prototyping or whatever.

But you can't mix plastic types. Sure most of what you collect would be PLA, but not all of it, and you can't really identify the polymer just by looking at it. So now you have to get information from the donor - what material did you print this with? And hope they remember the right thing. Also inspect every donation for foreign objects like screws or blobs of glue. And then label and keep records on all the material until you can get around to actually processing it through the recycling equipment.

Also you can't mix the material you run through the recycling - a little bit of PETG in a batch of PLA will ruin the whole batch and probably clog up the filament extruder, requiring you to stop and clean everything out. So you have to either have completely separate processing lines for PLA and PET and whatever else, or you have to clean the shredder and the extruder out really well between batches, or just limit what you process to one material.

The whole concept doesn't scale well beyond one person, but it's also a lot of equipment and a lot of work for one person to operate by themselves.