Recycle Your 3D Prints With Filamaker

Fabbaloo friend Joris Peels has written an extensive interview with Marek Senický, whose new venture, Filamaker, promises to shake up the filament industry. 

 

 

The Filamaker is a device that can recycle unwanted ABS 3D prints. It's not a complex device; it simply grinds up chunks of ABS, heats and extrudes it into precision filament. You can see how the process works in this short video.

 

The USD$500 device is not yet available, as Senický is still developing a kit for future sales on Indiegogo. However, he did show off a prototype at the Rome Makerfaire, attracting significant interest from those wishing to avoid paying USD$50 for colorful 1kg spools of plastic filament. 

 

We think this is a way that could make 3D printing even more green, but there could be challenges: 

 

• If you're interested in a specific color, you might be out of luck unless you can gather up enough leftovers of appropriate color. 
• There is the possibility of creating new colors by mixing differently-colored pieces, or even introducing colorant into the process somehow. But we suspect you'd be hard-pressed to consistently deliver the exact same shade. 
• Your leftover ABS pieces may or may not have come from previous prints. In fact, any old ABS could theoretically be used. This means you may not have providence on the material and it could contain toxic elements, potentially causing nasties. 

 

Nevertheless, if you happen to have a metric ton of half-completed 3D prints - and who doesn't? - then you might consider looking for this item when it comes available. 

 

Via VoxelFab

Finally: 3D Printer Recycling

We missed this one earlier this year, but it's still a terrific idea: The Filabot is a "plastic filament maker". The idea is straightforward, obvious when you think about it - and necessary. 

 

Any home 3D printer will tell you they end up with many unusable prints, perhaps due to printer failure of some kind, or perhaps the object is one of many iterations developed on the journey to the final version. What does one do with all these items? We keep ours in a box or on display for visitors, who are fascinated even seeing failed prints. 

 

But now there's another option. Filabot will grind your used prints, leftover short lengths of filament and any plastic scraps you may have lying around and melt it through a heated extruder into a brand new filament. It's 3D printer recycling! 

 

The Filabot can produce either 3.0 or 1.75mm filament from leftover ABS, PLA or even HDPE from milk jugs (just ensure you've used the milk first, please!) In fact, the Filabot can process HDPE, LDPE. PETE, Polymorph, Nylon, ABS, PLA, PVA and probably more once users start exploring. The device has three stages: Grinding the input material into tiny bits; extruding melted bits into a filament; finally spooling up the new filament for future use. 

 

Filabot was a Kickstarter project that closed earlier this year, raising over USD$32,000, far past its goal of USD$10,000. Dozens of supporters will receive do-it-yourself kits or assembled Filabots. We presume with this level of interest designer Tyler McNaney will take the product to market - and it appears so by looking at the Filabot website, which will offer the device for pre-order once the Kickstarter orders are processed. 

 

The Filabot could become a near-essential accessory for any filament-based home 3D printer, and not only for recycling plastic filament. Imagine the idea of mixing colored filament to produce new shades for specific applications. 

 

Finally there's a way to make that Tartan Filament! 

 

Via Kickstarter and Filabot (Hat tip to SymptomOfSociety)

Carbon Credits Required For 3D Makers?

We're reading a piece on GearFuse that reviews a short video of folks designing and printing some very cool salt and pepper shakers - but they say some things we disagree with:

 

But should we be at least slightly concerned about the way 3D printing seems to make plastic crap safe for hipsters? A given unit of ABS plastic requires about twice its weight in petroleum to produce. I have two words for you, young person: carbon credits.

 

This may be true - ABS plastic requires additional petroleum to produce and perhaps even more to ship it to your printer. But let's consider the following:

 

• The amount of plastic used by a 3D printer is minuscule, compared to other common uses of petroleum. Five pounds of ABS can print hundreds of small objects and keep a printer busy for many days, but Five pounds of gasoline is less than one single US gallon, sufficient to power a typical car for about 20 miles. In other words, you'll burn far more in one hour in a car than you'd use in a month of 3D printing. 
• You don't have to print ABS plastic. Another wonderful alternative is PLA, short for Polylactic Acid. This substance, while a tad more brittle than ABS is commonly used in home 3D printers - and it's environmentally renewable, being derived from corn, tapioca or sugarcane. Work is underway to develop methods of mechanically recycling PLA for 3D printing. In other words, grind up your old objects into powder/filament and print new things. Of course, PLA will still require the same transport costs to your home as ABS.
• Finally, the idea of printing things at home reduces hugely polluting intercontinental shipping, because items can be produced at home without shipment (other than the raw material, which in theory can be produced locally). It's our understanding that container ships have limited or even no requirements for pollution controls, so less shipping would be highly desirable. 

 

We believe 3D printing will prove net environment friendly if examined at a high-level. 

 

Via GearFuse

The Opposite of a 3D Printer?

The opposite of a 3D printer would be a recycling machine. In other words, there should be a way to collect leftover material (or even leftover objects) and convert them back into a medium suitable for feedstock back into a personal manufacturing device for creation of new objects. 

 

No such universal device exists today for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that most 3D printers have very strong affinity for specific materials. Thus, recycling would have to sort out input "chaff" from "the right stuff". Often that sorting would be done by you, not a machine. 

 

There have been some limited experiments in this area; a good list of ideas can be found at MakerBot's recycling wiki page, at least for plastic. In particular, the RepRap team has been thinking about such a device, in which raw PLA or other previously printed objects might be chopped up into tiny bits that could be recycled as input print material. 

  

Another experiment by the Victoria University of Wellington has attempted to make a device that converts used plastic milk jugs into a plastic filament suitable for feeding into a MakerBot. Check out the RecycleBot here. 

 

A discussion on the Open Manufacturing list is interesting, where Nicolas Dufour proposes a fantastic plasma torch-equipped device that would atomize material into a cloud, which would then be atomically sorted by a modified mass spectrometer into different categories. Fantastic, yes, but there's no doubt a bit of work yet exists required to turn that notion into reality. What would you do with all the leftover atoms you didn't need for your print material? How would you power such a device? Could this be financially feasible over simply buying raw material?  Would it even be legal to own something like that? What would the neighbours think?

 

What are your thoughts on where 3D recycling should go?