Project Title: Reducing 3D-Printed Plastic Waste: Creation of 3D-Printer Filament and Parts with Recycled Failed Prints

Project Description: Plastic pollution, and waste in general, has had a significant impact on the environment. It not only contributes to issues such as climate change but also harms the wildlife and flora that we coexist with. Plastic waste also poses a problem to human health in the form of microplastics that exist in our water supply and that we may also ingest from particles in the air. Solving this issue has mostly been looked at from the need to recycle disposable plastic products that are manufactured and commercialized in large quantities around the world. However, another source of plastic waste that has not been studied as widely is 3D-printing.

3D-printing or additive manufacturing is becoming a very popular and disruptive technology, especially to hobbyists, since it is more accessible and less expensive than traditional methods of manufacturing. While 3D-printing produces less waste compared to other manufacturing processes, there is still plastic waste generated from support material and failed prints. There is currently no standardized means for recycling 3D-printed plastics as there are for other plastics such as water bottles. 3D-printed plastics made from polymers such as PLA, ABS, or TPU have to be shipped to specialized facilities for recycling. This may not be cost-effective, accessible, or environmentally friendly for recycling 3D-printed plastics.

For this reason, this project proposes a process to create 3D-printer filament with plastics left over from printing. In this way, we can eliminate material waste and reuse the wasted plastic to make new 3D-printed parts. To add to this work, we will consider 3D-printing of a flexible and monolithic structure known as a compliant mechanism (CM). The project will be validated by comparing a CM printed with regular 3D-printer filament and a CM printed with the recycled 3D-printer filament. The three components that will be critical to this project are:

1. Developing a means to crush or shred failed parts in a controlled and contained space to avoid contamination
2. Melting and fusing of the 3D-printed plastics to create recycled filament
3. Testing the recycled filament by 3D-printing CMs.

We could potentially look at the combination of different types of 3D-printer polymers in the recycled filament, such as rigid plastics like PLA and flexible plastics like TPU, to develop different types of material behavior.