1 Topic by CornGolem

  • CornGolem
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Topic: Recycling your wasted plastic, is it worth it ?

First lets assume that 1Kg of pellets costs $10 and that you can only use 20% of wasted plastic to make new filament. Also that one person uses an average of 2Kg per month.

To recycle it there are few solutions:

• Buy a desktop plastic grinder that some DIYer designed*, or design and build one yourself, for lets say $500.
*To my knowledge there is only one and it's small compared to the biggest parts you can print.
So the return on investment would take 50Kg and 2 years.

• Buy a wood shredder. They cost ≈$200 but it's not known if they can shred big plastic parts and if they shred small enough.

• Buy a professional granulator, a machine the size of a fridge that cost at least $1500.

• Send your plastic to a recycling service (could be a person with a professional granulator) and get it back in pellet form. The price would have to be much lower than new pellets which would not make it a very interesting business. Also the price of shipping, especially if to another country, could nullify any benefit.

2 Reply by elmoret

  • elmoret
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Re: Recycling your wasted plastic, is it worth it ?

I agree completely. A lot of people have asked about the Filastruder and recycling plastic. It isn't really an issue of the Filastruder itself, it is the additional expense of getting it into a form that can be processed by an extruder, which is tough to justify (to me) when the raw material is so cheap.

I guess it makes sense from an environmental point of view if you don't have plastics recycling in your area.

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3 Reply by laird

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Re: Recycling your wasted plastic, is it worth it ?

The quantities of failed prints that I generate aren't enough to make recycling an economic issue, but more a philosophical one. That is, the amount of money saved by recycling the quantities of material I generate at home isn't enough to make it worth the cost of doing the recycling, so it's more recycling for the sake of recycling. Which I kinda like.

The thing that convinced me (for now) not to try to recycle failed prints wasn't the money/expense, it was finding out that people who do injection molding for living only use 10% or so recycled material in their mix, because more than that causes problems, so for anything of any quality at all they use at least 90% new material. So the best you can do is reduce your new material purchases 10%. Which isn't exciting.

So while I like the *idea* of recycling, it doesn't seem worthwhile for home 3D printing.

One possible exception: Taulman's T-glase is reportedly 100% recyclable. And it's fairly expensive. So that might be worth recycling. Though since it's nearly indestructible, I have no idea *how* to recycle it. :-)

4 Reply by sscam2013

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Re: Recycling your wasted plastic, is it worth it ?

I think its better to do recycling of plastic. There is a huge benefits of this. If we want to make our environment clean then its a good choice to make a reuse of the plastic which is going to be in dustbin. Not only plastics they if any waste material which is reusable we should try to reuse them.

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5 Reply by gr1f1th

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Re: Recycling your wasted plastic, is it worth it ?

recycle a wood shredder off of craigslist for $60. ;P
I'm considering this route as I have garden waste that I want composted as well. Composting is then it's primary task and the recycled material ala milk cartons, failed prints is supplemental. Poor ability to clean the shredder between each could cause serious contamination problems though.

6 Reply by DePartedPrinter

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Re: Recycling your wasted plastic, is it worth it ?

elmoret wrote:

...the raw material is so cheap.

this

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