Neat, I can make some nice plastic cutlery with that filament!
this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
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I've believed for a long time that a viable way to do this consistently is the game changing technology that will change the world.
A system where every home has a 3D printer, and beside it, an economical, easy to use recycler that turns your plastic bottles, etc.. into working filament.
Dishes, cutlery, cooking utensils, you name it, could just be recycled in an environmental loop, or used as raw material for a coat hanger or a curtain hook or any other thing made of plastic in our homes.
It would change the world more than 3D printing already has.
I'm not an expert, but plastic degrades. It still needs new plastic in the mix to keep its material properties. Not all plastic is suitable for everything either, and not all can be recycled.
I do agree that it would be awesome, but don't think it's feasible in the near future.
It might become feasible for certain types of plastic. #1 and #2 (PET and HDPE) are easily cleaned and remelted.
ABS can offgas butadiene (the B) and is pretty cancerous.
PVC can lose the Chloride and that’s deadly too.
The polystyrene is too bulky to make sense recycling in low quantities without big compaction equipment. But apparently can be profitable if you can offload the compaction and collection costs to sellers or consumers. Otherwise recyclers don’t touch it.
We really just need to outlaw using most difficult to handle plastics for one time use.
You can at melt polystyrene down with acetone for compact storage and repurpose it as glue. It's an option at least.
Mmmmm VOCs
Cooking on a gas stove produces so many VOCs that any plastic melting will cry in the corner. Yet many people still cook on a gas.
Yeah, finding out how much crap comes out of those stoves really makes me upset about all the shitty landlords I had over the years that didn’t bother installing working vents over the stoves.
Got a halogen/glass stove now and it works great.
Yes, and he demostrates that in the video.
Steffan added a small percentage of virgin plastic to his re-grind material and the result was stronger than just the original plastic material before grinding/extruding.
Pretty neat idea, hopefully the equipment needed keeps getting smaller and cheaper.
Right now it doesn't make a lot of sense except for larger, or shared maker type spaces.
I'm still pissed he threw away that marinara. Could have used the cutlery to eat some noodles and then do his project. Talking about waste and then that.
Schäm dich, Brudi.
Also buying cutlery instead of sourcing used cutlery, shipping the recycled filament to someone and burning more carbon in the process on top of the wasted marinara sauce.
I like Stefan and his channel, but those were the wrong actions if you're going to talk about waste and environmentalism.
For any experiment to give you meaningful results you need to control some of the variables.
Agreed, however that's missing the point of my criticism. He framed the whole video around waste, then proceeded to create more waste.
And? You can't make a meaningful experiment without controlling your inputs.
It is neat to see that materials in the same polymer family can have such a large difference in properties.
Plastic cutlery is disappearing in most countries - it's all wood or cardboard now. I suppose someone could make a business of collecting used cutlery where it's still in use and recycle it (not necessarily into filament), but I wonder if it would be economically viable.