Gartner suggests that there will be 6.7 million 3D printers sold by the year 2020. Whilst this certainly has the potential to reduce waste and also on-going material costs, it can be expensive in the first instance (buying equipment) and labour-intensive thereafter. Our friends at Lancashire3D have achieved exactly that – 3D-printed waste is collected, shredded, and remanufactured – using a desktop 3D printing extruder – into 100% recycled filament. We also have a blog post on what to do with failed prints and 3D printing waste.įor ‘3D printer farms’ and businesses using high volumes of 3D printing, it may be shrewd for an in-situ recycling system to be developed.
To explain our position, we wrote an article titled: Recycling Failed and Waste 3D Prints into Filament: Challenges. Many operational and logistic concerns exist in regards to receiving waste, in addition to the obvious challenge of quality control. When waste cannot be avoided, recycling such waste is often the first thought of many.Īs a provider of filament made from recycled plastic, recycling waste/failed 3D-prints is definitely an aspiration. Respondents were then asked to choose their biggest cause/s of 3D printing waste – Test prints, unwanted prototypes, support structures, failed prints, other.Īs exemplified here, the ease of 3D printing will still breed masses of unwanted prints – FastCompany aptly used the terms “crapjects” to describe how “on-demand production and endless customisation could lead to dramatic increases in throwaway consumer products.” Taking a lower percentile average of 10%, we can aggregate this with 3D printer filament usage (kg) to calculate a 3D printing waste volume of 8 million kilograms (2020). 6-19% was clearly the most popular answer. It was certainly notable that all respondents confirmed that 3D printing creates waste to some degree (no one answering 0%). Taking a median perspective, the majority of 3D printer users surveyed use ≤2 kg / month (24 kg annually).
In early 2019 we sent out a survey (>200 respondents) to assess the state of material sustainability in 3D printing – encompassing material choice, wastage and preference for recycled filament.įilament usage varied it can be safely assumed that hobbyists use much less filament that a 3D-printing service business.
However, 3D-printing is regarded as somewhat of a double-edged sword – whilst at its core 3D printing is fundamentally less wasteful than traditional, subtractive manufacturing methods, the use of plastic as a feedstock has the potential to exacerbate the global plastic problem unless we can find sustainable solutions. FDM is a process in which a thin filament of plastic wire feeds a 3D printer the print head melts it and extrudes it onto a build plate. Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) is one of the main types of 3D printing.
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