3D Print Less Wastefully

Use Your Printer More Mindfully

You know how you bought a 3D printer to do great things? Well, here we are, you and I, and at least one of us has been through a few kilos of filament and is still feeling okay about it. (Clue: It's me... 😸) 

Why? Read: Recycle Guide. There's half a dozen things in the article that you can do to manage your printer and keep your plastic waste footprint down. Apparently we might be eco-vandals for printing with plastic, and should be ashamed. Or something. And I like All3DP, they were one of my prime sources for info and still one of my go-to's - but this article almost made me not feel okay about my FFF hobby. . .

But don't let the article snow you - the amount of waste filament of the "...large 3D printing community..." isn't as much as you'd believe. Coupled to this is that members of that "large 3D printing community" are already a bit strict about their wastage, i.e. they mind their expenses. 

But right away the very next tip is to reduce supports, adhesion, and infill. I'm going to say it - don't do that. By taking away those supporting parts, you're effectively chucking 12 years' of combined Maker experience down the dunny, your parts may fail to adhere, fail to print properly, and/or end up too fragile for purpose, meaning instead of putting a few bits of support and adhesion print into your FAILS bin, you'll be putting the whole model and starting again.

You know the feeling when a 16hr print comes unstuck in the last hour because it got tall enough for the leverage of the sticky hot nozzle to break the base of the model off the bed? It's a totally AAARRGGGHHH!!! feeling when it happens. And then a few hundred grams of insufficiently supported plastic ends up having to be thrown out and the object reprinted. I prefer to save my sanity. When a part is going to be skinny and tall, print it with a raft or brim, go on - devil take it! - use that extra half a gram of filament!

If you're (as the article also says you should) recycling all your waste prints (and you should be doing this for sure) what's your strategy? Does everything go in the FAILS bin together? What sort of strategy is that, other than a really bad one? I have a big bin for PLA because I find PLA does a good job for my range of  prints. That picture is my "big" bin of supports, adhesion plastic, and odds and ends of filament from nearly two years and countless spools of hobbyist level printing.

This is my filament ends and support
waste - from two years of printing.

There are about twelve re-used old plastic vegetable bags in there, each with just one specific colour of filament, and these contain all my 'wasteful' support and adhesion waste. Keeping it sorted by colour means that I can recycle my filament in a colour other than "Depressing Grey Drab" when I get to do it. And I know it's all PLA in that particular bucket.

I also have a single bag for PETG because I actually have a single spool of PETG in a  chic shade of Depressing Grey Drab that I've used for two models because they needed to survive a bit more heat than PLA can handle. I have a single 4litre tub with failed PLA prints, drafts, and test pieces, stuff that turned out not to be wanted. It's easy enough to sort into colours too. 

I can't stress enough how much more useful your old plastic is if you keep it sorted by type AND colour - and being how I also try to recycle all our household plastic, that's paid off with all the HDPE, LDPE, and PP that I've got sitting outside in old buckets and bags and so forth. I guess if you're a regular reader you'd have heard me mention it. 

Making filament at home from printer waste can be done and is probably a good idea - if you can afford the cost of those machines, and can live with the realisation that you'll maybe recycle five spools of filament's worth of scrap over the entire lifetime of printing that you'll do. For that, you'll have consumed several stepper motors, cogs, gears, power supplies, control boards, and a whole heap of your time. 

I can't justify that as a hobbyist. If I was a commercial printer making hundreds of kilos of parts every year, it *might* make sense if I have a lot of support waste. I'm not going to say "failed prints" because if you have a lot of failed prints then maybe commercial 3D printing isn't for you . . . 

But - if I can after five or six years of printing send my waste to a filament maker, and they can recycle it easily into coloured filament because I've sorted it for them, then I'm down with that. They'll have the machinery to do it already, me sorting it for them will mean they can use it to make nicely coloured new filament, and everyone benefits.

If you balked at the "nicely coloured new filament" bit above, consider this: part of the problem with plastic is that it LASTS such a long time without degrading. And melting a plastic and re-forming it at the right temperature won't degrade it, it'll be as good as virgin plastic. That's what plastic is infamous for after all . . .

Sidebar: You know how soft drink manufacturers won't take back their huge mountains of plastic empties? It's NOT because the new bottles made from the old PET will somehow be crappier than a new one. It's because it's "too expensive" for them to add the steps of shredding and washing the old bottles. Yup - these companies are watching the world being choked poisoned by their products because they're too tight-fisted to deal with their waste themselves. 

And the only reason they keep doing that is because we - you and I and everyone else - keep buying their product and not insisting that it be put in glass or in a returnable recycled container. 

An Exception To The "Don't Recycle At Home For 3D Printing" idea:

One of the things I'm working on (as mentioned a few paragraphs back) is recycling my household's plastic waste (and a lot more waste streams, once I can afford to make / buy the gear to do so) and currently all I can do it use it in flat sheets or in ironed-onto-cloth form. But if I can afford to make a shredder and quick and dirty extruder, I can make pellets out of the plastic waste, and those pellets can be used in a dozen ways, including as filament and in pellet form to 3D print. That's the only way I could justify the monetary and ecological cost of a filament making setup, and only then it would make sense to also recycle my old PLA waste, seeing I'd have the gear on hand. 

There's also a few 3D printer hot end/extruder setups now that use pelleted plastics, and can print my PLA if I make it into pellet form and save the step of extruding filament. (Read the last part of the article about how filament needs to be cooled and why home setups can't compete with the 10 - 30 metre cooling path that a filament factory can spread out across. All not necessary if you use pelleted plastic stock.)

Conclusion:

Don't stress too much about your plastic footprint. Instead,. make sure you have a good recovery, storage, and send-to-recycle plan for your scrap plastic. Don't take too many reckless shortcuts with the actual prints themselves, try not to print too many single use items. (I print the odd trinket for the house such as a small Nefertiti bust or a few wall butterflies, but they're part of the decor and will stay in use for 5 - 10 years. Other than that I try and keep my prints utilitarian. And I try to nail dimensions with as few iterations as possible, and have even been known to print only two layers then aborting if I needed to check a design for fit,) 

Most of all, enjoy your models and keep pushing designs - of both printers and products. 

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