3dprinting

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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 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.