That bit about testing the strength of the recycled plastic was extra interesting. To get more recycled products we should reward companies that compete with sustainability. Measurement, standards and incentives need to be established to foster that.
i've kept my head out of the 3d printing arena, but this now makes me want one, being able to upcycle stuff that is regarded as waste! absolute genius!
Thanks for covering this, Tom. I love how Josh got this up and running - I built a Recreator using the Xvico from his original plans and it's so cool being able to convert bottles into filament at home.
It’s a beautiful project. The PET became my free filament and the Recreator is improved to a really reliable machine. I printed earrings less than a mm thick with bottle PET. And my dungeon tiles are adding on the pile of shame. An MMU makes the job easier, a palette allows to join filaments effortlessly. I went for my Voron build before time just to mount an ERCF and print free and environmentally friendly parts for my hobbies.
These types of video has convinced me that 3d printing is the recycling future we need. We need not just bottles but molten plastic into filament is what needs to be made super dirt cheap
I built a ReCreator3D and made a few bottles into filament before needing to use a PSU from it. But I'll soon have it pulling PET1 bottles again. It's a great project and Josh is very helpful to those looking to build one..... Which you should ;-).
@@TheRainHarvester I'm not, haven't used mine enough to make it needed. But on the Facebook group people are trying different things and I believe Josh is working with a commercial product that may work well?
Love the channel. I'd love to see a video of using onshape to design things that are bigger than my printer. Showing a good way make parts that can be joined to make a bigger part.
As much as I love reusing plastic, PET is the one plastic that is highly recyclable in my area. So taking it out of the recycle stream isn't helpful. We really need a way to reuse PP (5 mark) and ideally all plastics. Maybe we just need a universal pellet extruder than can use shredded plastic.
Here is an idea; there is a dealer that sell warranty returned Enders as a print farm starter (2, 3, 5, printers) for lower prices, I would be tempted to buy a pair of them and turn one into a pull-struder rig to make PET filament.
interesting project. you can improve its efficiency by increasing the melting temperature and accelerating the cooling system by using the PELTIER module
Wouldn't it be great to get these in to the hands of people in developing countries, where it might be hard (and very expensive for local wage levels) to get new filament? I've seen some reports of people in remote villages in developing countries using 3D printing to benefit their communities. Being able to access free feedstock could be a game changer.
It sure would as long as they have PET-1 bottles lying around. My experience in South America was that most soda came in a thicker plastic bottle that was reusable from the factory and there was a deposit required for the bottle itself. This taught me that what is commonplace in North America may be uncommon in other parts of the world.
What would be better is a hopper where you can put ground (or to be ground) PETG in and it grinds and melts to a useable filament. This way you can use the whole plastic whatever container and not have to spool it like the bottle. The amount of PETG that goes in the garbage is insane (fruit containers, produce containers, plastic bottles, product bubble heat wraps, etc). Recycle all of this stuff!!
I am interested in this method, but from what I have read/heard the major limiting factors are 1. No Gycol molecule, totally different filament to PETG, with very different properties, PET for bottles etc is designed to cool very fast, this is why the molds often have water cooling 2. The moisture, same as printing PETG, PET is hydroscopic, and would need drying prior to, or during extruding
one bottle peeler is good, but i reckon having some kind of method to start feeding in a second peeler strand before the end of the previous peeled strand has completely been sucked into the pull-struder. so, in short, two peelers instead of one. maybe taper the end of the first strand and taper the beginning of the next strand? fun problem!
"sadly" in Germany it is not really viable to do this due to our "Pfandsystem" (depositsystem) . The bottle value is too high (0.25€ per bottle) and there are not many products in deposit free PET bottles anymore. But at least the bottles here are recycled in a more general way. But for other countries this seems to be a really cool idea!
Hello from Finland! Here 92% of PET bottles are recycled. Clear bottles can cycle basically indefinitely as new bottles, but coloured bottles have to be made into something else. Big 1.5 litre bottles have value of 0.4€ and small bottles are 0.15€.
And most PET bottles only have a small smooth section that you can extract from rendering the rest of the bottle useless for recycling so they go into the general trash.
Unfortunately, most of the plastic waste in which bottles end up in Germany is not actually recycled. Instead, because of its high and well-defined calorific value, the plastic waste is often needed to better control the incineration of other waste. Nevertheless, this certainly depends from disposal company to disposal company.
@@tmartin9482 Normal plastic waste (gelber Sack/gelbe Tonne) is burned (e.g. in cement ovens or waste incineration plants), but thats not true for collected PET-bottles. In germany most of all returned PET-bottles are reused as PET, since it is a relatively clean "waste" and only a very minor part is burned (which is still much better than throwing it in a landfill or in the sea; data: „Aufkommen und Verwertung von PET-Getränkeflaschen in Deutschland 2019“ der Gesellschaft für Verpackungsmarktforschung (GVM)).
The only thing I hate about the design...how does it compensate for varying wall-thickness of the bottle? Y'all may have addressed this somewhere else, but here is my take on the issue. PET bottles are the opposite of Dinosaurs: while extinct lizards are thin at both ends and much thicker in the middle, bottle side-walls tend to be thinnest in the middle and much ticker at the ends. A strip the same width is easy/peasy; a strip of constant VOLUME (see what I did there?) is a little tougher. Or not... A pinch-roller that 'senses' the thickness of the side-wall being cut would be tied to a mechanism that alters the width of the strip in response. Result is a strip of material with a constant cross-sectional area, which leads to uniform filament diameter.
I need something like this for recycling print scraps rather than soda bottles. So much PLA and PETG scrap I'd love to turn back into filament with as little fiddling as possible.
was wondering how to join the filaments into one continuous length. Secret sauce is the runout sensor and a person there to change the filament real fast. Cool! Would be useful on islands where importing anything is expensive but plastic bottles show up on the beach for free every day. I wonder how many solar panels it would take to run the pultruder and 3-d printer.
I'm running a Recreator3D MK5Kit right now and it's drawing about 25 watts. So a single modest solar panel in direct sunlight would do it. As for the printing, it depends on many factors of the specific printer. If you can figure out a way to print PET without a heated bed, that will save a lot of power.
If you don't have any old ender machine laying around then petamentor is best option. It's way more cheaper (under 50$) and simple to build (no need any programming)
I mean, by the very nature of granular materials, you cant pull-xtrude em unless you mean actually melting it and then pulling it, in which case theres plenty of em in the wild
@@rmanami yeah I understand that this kind of system wouldn’t work, but the more cheap DIY filament machines the better, and machines that can work with pellet or shredded material will open up more materials that can be made into filament and bring in a lot more trash that can be recycled
Its usually not a very fun process with things you build yourself. Works ok for abs within a "good" tolerance but for PLA you most likely need a longer table with cooling and spooling and all controlled well. Within a month you find yourself in a self build filament production plant. :D
Working on that next! Trying to change how the industry operates and that is going to take some big steps and a loud mouth. Luckily I bellow miles away!
For anyone interested in this but don't want to waste an ender, you only need wooden board, stepper motor, heatblock with heater and thermistor, mbo, screen and PSU. For rest there is Petpull2 on thingverse
I'm new to 3d printing but how much would u sell that filament maker system for becouse that's a great ideas saving plastic waste and saving on pla👍👍😊😊
I love the idea. In regards to his problem with joining his recycled filaments, why not manually jpin them and then pass them through the pullstruder again? Surely that would sort out any size inconsistencies and ensure a better bond.
That would take a longgg time. Best is find a way to join it properly with a removable clip, second best might be a way to auto feed sections of filament in.
How do you control it do you use the printer circuit board If so how do you program it to just turn on without having a print for the circuit board to print
In Germany the seller charges a deposit on most PET Bottles, most glass bottles and aluminium cans, usually 25 cent. So this looks really cool but is expensive to operate for us
nice but heres the problem you can only do one bottle so a small ammount of filament per roll very small theres no way to merge another bottle to make a whole 2kg roll.. so for small stuff sure.. what you need is a continuiouse like they use professionally to make filament with screws and pellots and a way to make the pellets grinding them up and melting them into pellets that would be ideal
I always wondered whether can we put multiple bottles feeding with thinner ribbons cut, making the subsequent roll same in quality but combined in length.
The problem might be getting the three ribbons to roll on themselves. Another way to do it might be to process three bottles as normal, then either twist or braid them together. As long as you can get it started through the heat break, there should be no issue with trying to get them to roll since it's just a straight pull.
I made one fr9m an old broken Anet a8 not to long ago, the problem I'm running into is the filament keeps jamming up in my printer. Haven't been able to get it to work reliably no matter what I try.
How does the shape of the bottle affect the quality parameters of the resulting filament? Nowadays I rarely see those mostly cylindrical bottles in Central Europe that I see in all the Recreator videos. Most are tallied or have intentional dents, bulges or grooves.
You either have to put some water in the bottles then heat them up so they expand or you pump air into the bottles as if you were doing a tube or car tire then heat it up. What this does is expands the bottle and pulls out all the ripples and thins out the bottle a little but and smooth. Then you cut them into strips and extrude into flilament.
@@rogsolutions I mainly encountered PET crystallization in vacuum forming and after weeks of trying to tune the process I gave up and switched to PETG. Doesn't crystallize and thanks to that it behaves much better around the temperatures where it softens for 3D printing/vacuum forming. I imagine that's why almost all the commercially available filaments are PETG instead of pure PET.
@@bzqp2 yep, I believe that is the case, and that is what holds Precious Plastics back from large scale recycling of PET too, time to make everything from HDPE I think! /s
Probably one of the coolest printer related mods in 2022.
Виталий Богачёв "my homemade machine for making a rod from plastic bottles for a 3D printer" 2018 year
I can't think of a better idea, great people behind it to!
That bit about testing the strength of the recycled plastic was extra interesting. To get more recycled products we should reward companies that compete with sustainability. Measurement, standards and incentives need to be established to foster that.
I'm just amazed by how smooth you could transition from the most recycle friendly material to a resin ad ...
Dude, this guy is epic! Such a cool way to address both plastic waste and e-waste!
LOVE this project, Josh is such a good human too. Love that dude.
2:22
@@MA-oz2rn Peekaboo
He never replies back to me, I think he is a ghost 😂😂😂
i've kept my head out of the 3d printing arena, but this now makes me want one, being able to upcycle stuff that is regarded as waste! absolute genius!
Thanks for covering this, Tom. I love how Josh got this up and running - I built a Recreator using the Xvico from his original plans and it's so cool being able to convert bottles into filament at home.
This is kick ass, one of the best spin offs of the bottle to filiment, prosses I invented in 2018, I'v ever seen. Clean design and well thought out.
It’s a beautiful project. The PET became my free filament and the Recreator is improved to a really reliable machine. I printed earrings less than a mm thick with bottle PET. And my dungeon tiles are adding on the pile of shame.
An MMU makes the job easier, a palette allows to join filaments effortlessly.
I went for my Voron build before time just to mount an ERCF and print free and environmentally friendly parts for my hobbies.
Thanks Tom for sharing what was on ERRF with us :)
Couldn't help but notice the 3DPN high five over his shoulder at 1:43 LOL
It was cool talking to him on saturday, he knows alot about what hes doing. Im thinking about making one!
Thank you Tom I was hoping someone posted about this!
These types of video has convinced me that 3d printing is the recycling future we need. We need not just bottles but molten plastic into filament is what needs to be made super dirt cheap
Super cool project. Glad to see options and progress towards recycling. Mahalo for sharing! : )
I usually don't notice thumbnails, but the one you made for this video is beautiful.
I just finished building up an returned ender 3. I got it for $55 and was able to get just about all the upgrades cheaper than the original printer.
Please do a follow-up later with them. And it would be awesome if you did one about the resin cast and hand-operated injection molding process.
check thecraftsman steadycraftin that guy has all the mould videos
So many people are making them it's great to see I and Mr3d have helped so many ♥
Genuinely interesting advert ! Cheers Tom
I built a ReCreator3D and made a few bottles into filament before needing to use a PSU from it. But I'll soon have it pulling PET1 bottles again. It's a great project and Josh is very helpful to those looking to build one..... Which you should ;-).
Thanks man! Appreciate you! Humbled.
How are you splicing ?
@@TheRainHarvester I'm not, haven't used mine enough to make it needed. But on the Facebook group people are trying different things and I believe Josh is working with a commercial product that may work well?
CANT WAIT FOR THE MOLD MAKING 🤩🤩
I lol-ed thinking about grabbing a returned Ender for this. Super cool.
I really like that the machine looks to be mostly made of the bottle plastic.
Love the channel. I'd love to see a video of using onshape to design things that are bigger than my printer. Showing a good way make parts that can be joined to make a bigger part.
Thank you for covering this, personally I hope we get more machines like this to help recycle old things into new and interesting ones. =)
This is honestly an innovation this guys a top g
As much as I love reusing plastic, PET is the one plastic that is highly recyclable in my area. So taking it out of the recycle stream isn't helpful. We really need a way to reuse PP (5 mark) and ideally all plastics. Maybe we just need a universal pellet extruder than can use shredded plastic.
Here is an idea; there is a dealer that sell warranty returned Enders as a print farm starter (2, 3, 5, printers) for lower prices, I would be tempted to buy a pair of them and turn one into a pull-struder rig to make PET filament.
Amazing work!!!
Cool project. What a legend
awesome project
interesting project. you can improve its efficiency by increasing the melting temperature and accelerating the cooling system by using the PELTIER module
Great idea, and implementation ✌
More of this please!
This is very tempting to make...
This is so frgn awesome!
This is USA we all would need. This is brilliant, in all aspects.
Wouldn't it be great to get these in to the hands of people in developing countries, where it might be hard (and very expensive for local wage levels) to get new filament? I've seen some reports of people in remote villages in developing countries using 3D printing to benefit their communities. Being able to access free feedstock could be a game changer.
It sure would as long as they have PET-1 bottles lying around. My experience in South America was that most soda came in a thicker plastic bottle that was reusable from the factory and there was a deposit required for the bottle itself. This taught me that what is commonplace in North America may be uncommon in other parts of the world.
For the moment Siraya Tech is my favorite resin (i've test build and simple)
What would be better is a hopper where you can put ground (or to be ground) PETG in and it grinds and melts to a useable filament. This way you can use the whole plastic whatever container and not have to spool it like the bottle. The amount of PETG that goes in the garbage is insane (fruit containers, produce containers, plastic bottles, product bubble heat wraps, etc). Recycle all of this stuff!!
*PET/PETG whichever it is.
I am interested in this method, but from what I have read/heard the major limiting factors are
1. No Gycol molecule, totally different filament to PETG, with very different properties, PET for bottles etc is designed to cool very fast, this is why the molds often have water cooling
2. The moisture, same as printing PETG, PET is hydroscopic, and would need drying prior to, or during extruding
Outstanding!
one bottle peeler is good, but i reckon having some kind of method to start feeding in a second peeler strand before the end of the previous peeled strand has completely been sucked into the pull-struder. so, in short, two peelers instead of one. maybe taper the end of the first strand and taper the beginning of the next strand? fun problem!
great great work on a much needed machine, also spot the 3dPrintingNerd Joel's photo (video) bomb LOL
"sadly" in Germany it is not really viable to do this due to our "Pfandsystem" (depositsystem) . The bottle value is too high (0.25€ per bottle) and there are not many products in deposit free PET bottles anymore. But at least the bottles here are recycled in a more general way.
But for other countries this seems to be a really cool idea!
Hello from Finland! Here 92% of PET bottles are recycled. Clear bottles can cycle basically indefinitely as new bottles, but coloured bottles have to be made into something else. Big 1.5 litre bottles have value of 0.4€ and small bottles are 0.15€.
And most PET bottles only have a small smooth section that you can extract from rendering the rest of the bottle useless for recycling so they go into the general trash.
Unfortunately, most of the plastic waste in which bottles end up in Germany is not actually recycled. Instead, because of its high and well-defined calorific value, the plastic waste is often needed to better control the incineration of other waste.
Nevertheless, this certainly depends from disposal company to disposal company.
@@tmartin9482 Normal plastic waste (gelber Sack/gelbe Tonne) is burned (e.g. in cement ovens or waste incineration plants), but thats not true for collected PET-bottles. In germany most of all returned PET-bottles are reused as PET, since it is a relatively clean "waste" and only a very minor part is burned (which is still much better than throwing it in a landfill or in the sea; data: „Aufkommen und Verwertung von PET-Getränkeflaschen in Deutschland 2019“ der Gesellschaft für Verpackungsmarktforschung (GVM)).
@@kleinerELM TY for clarification and the reference!
The only thing I hate about the design...how does it compensate for varying wall-thickness of the bottle?
Y'all may have addressed this somewhere else, but here is my take on the issue.
PET bottles are the opposite of Dinosaurs: while extinct lizards are thin at both ends and much thicker in the middle, bottle side-walls tend to be thinnest in the middle and much ticker at the ends.
A strip the same width is easy/peasy; a strip of constant VOLUME (see what I did there?) is a little tougher.
Or not...
A pinch-roller that 'senses' the thickness of the side-wall being cut would be tied to a mechanism that alters the width of the strip in response.
Result is a strip of material with a constant cross-sectional area, which leads to uniform filament diameter.
I need something like this for recycling print scraps rather than soda bottles. So much PLA and PETG scrap I'd love to turn back into filament with as little fiddling as possible.
Finally a use for the Ender 3! xD
Look for PETamentor mk2, the easiest and cheapest to make, well documented and no need to use microcontroller or programming
eh, this project looks better
freaking cool
So cool! I would love to buy one unit ready to recycle PET bottles
I love this idea 😍 sent a fallow 🤗 I am definitely interested in learning more
Polyformer is a similar project to this! I built one and it's great!
Right...they branched from Recreator3D :P I think it's pretty, but Recreator3D has a different mission. Happy Recreating!
best projet of the world, GJ
Love it. Better looking than mine 😂
What do you think about ultrasonic welding, to join the mini-spools you get from each bottle together?
Might it be easier to slice the bottle first, then join the strips, then pultrude the continuous length of strip?
was wondering how to join the filaments into one continuous length. Secret sauce is the runout sensor and a person there to change the filament real fast. Cool! Would be useful on islands where importing anything is expensive but plastic bottles show up on the beach for free every day. I wonder how many solar panels it would take to run the pultruder and 3-d printer.
I'm running a Recreator3D MK5Kit right now and it's drawing about 25 watts. So a single modest solar panel in direct sunlight would do it. As for the printing, it depends on many factors of the specific printer. If you can figure out a way to print PET without a heated bed, that will save a lot of power.
Not sure, but very interested in finding a way to add value to plastic on the islands, where in the world are you? I am south Pacific based
If you don't have any old ender machine laying around then petamentor is best option. It's way more cheaper (under 50$) and simple to build (no need any programming)
I would really like to see something like this that can make filament from shredded material or pellets
I mean, by the very nature of granular materials, you cant pull-xtrude em
unless you mean actually melting it and then pulling it, in which case theres plenty of em in the wild
@@rmanami yeah I understand that this kind of system wouldn’t work, but the more cheap DIY filament machines the better, and machines that can work with pellet or shredded material will open up more materials that can be made into filament and bring in a lot more trash that can be recycled
th-cam.com/video/TQrTkIQA-0E/w-d-xo.html
Its usually not a very fun process with things you build yourself. Works ok for abs within a "good" tolerance but for PLA you most likely need a longer table with cooling and spooling and all controlled well. Within a month you find yourself in a self build filament production plant. :D
Working on that next! Trying to change how the industry operates and that is going to take some big steps and a loud mouth. Luckily I bellow miles away!
I have been kicking around the idea of using a 3d printer hot end and extruder to injection mold. I think for small parts it might be possible
one problem may be in design. with more yield filament may be thinner due to diameter increase
You gotta eat your pizza!
Good dude.
thats awesome.
Amazing
I was gifted an Ender 3 Pro by a customer and I've decided that building a gadget like this will be my first major project.
For anyone interested in this but don't want to waste an ender, you only need wooden board, stepper motor, heatblock with heater and thermistor, mbo, screen and PSU. For rest there is Petpull2 on thingverse
how clever you are😱😳🤩
k guess i have a new project now so thanks for that lol. Does the semi molten portion not need any cooling fan?
I love how in "first world countries" this is a garbage find, while for us, an ender 3 is printer farm material.
What a champ.
I have no I treat in doing this but I watched this whole video and am leaving this comment because I love this channel
This is cool. Super slow, but cool AF.
I'm new to 3d printing but how much would u sell that filament maker system for becouse that's a great ideas saving plastic waste and saving on pla👍👍😊😊
I love the idea. In regards to his problem with joining his recycled filaments, why not manually jpin them and then pass them through the pullstruder again? Surely that would sort out any size inconsistencies and ensure a better bond.
That would take a longgg time. Best is find a way to join it properly with a removable clip, second best might be a way to auto feed sections of filament in.
@@jaro6985 what Is a removable clip? I can't picture a clip fitting into an extruder. And when do you remove it?
@@TheRainHarvester a clip around the two loose filament ends, heat them to weld them together, then remove the clip.
You can splice filament by mosaic pallate 3
How do you control it do you use the printer circuit board If so how do you program it to just turn on without having a print for the circuit board to print
In Germany the seller charges a deposit on most PET Bottles, most glass bottles and aluminium cans, usually 25 cent. So this looks really cool but is expensive to operate for us
nice but heres the problem you can only do one bottle so a small ammount of filament per roll very small theres no way to merge another bottle to make a whole 2kg roll.. so for small stuff sure.. what you need is a continuiouse like they use professionally to make filament with screws and pellots and a way to make the pellets grinding them up and melting them into pellets that would be ideal
How is plastic from bottles Vs pla, or petg regarding strengt and difficulties? Like, does pet shrink like for example abs likes to do?
Now you just need the idle arm to move back and forth to properly spool
I always wondered whether can we put multiple bottles feeding with thinner ribbons cut, making the subsequent roll same in quality but combined in length.
The problem might be getting the three ribbons to roll on themselves. Another way to do it might be to process three bottles as normal, then either twist or braid them together. As long as you can get it started through the heat break, there should be no issue with trying to get them to roll since it's just a straight pull.
when making the pet filament that comes out of the hot nozzle will be a tube?
now that's recycling. finally. thank you.
Connect the 8mm bottle strip to next bottle rather than the molten filament to molten filament to continue making long filaments
I have an old ender 3 main board, screen, hotend, thermistors and heaters. I really want to make one of these but don’t know where to start…
I made one fr9m an old broken Anet a8 not to long ago, the problem I'm running into is the filament keeps jamming up in my printer. Haven't been able to get it to work reliably no matter what I try.
Maybe the only true bottle recycling on the planet. Because all the city collection is BS, thanks Siraya for your wonderful work.
Excelente! 👍
How does the shape of the bottle affect the quality parameters of the resulting filament? Nowadays I rarely see those mostly cylindrical bottles in Central Europe that I see in all the Recreator videos. Most are tallied or have intentional dents, bulges or grooves.
You either have to put some water in the bottles then heat them up so they expand or you pump air into the bottles as if you were doing a tube or car tire then heat it up. What this does is expands the bottle and pulls out all the ripples and thins out the bottle a little but and smooth. Then you cut them into strips and extrude into flilament.
I need one to create free filament, where can I buy this(not 3d printer)?
I have two machines to break down so this could be great 👍
thanks for saving us...
A wild Joel appears
Edit: lol a small one as well
adorable.
No info on the injection molds from little peices?
I have no idea how he avoids crystallization in pure PET. From my experience it's simply impossible :P
Interested to know your thoughts on any techniques to prevent that
@@rogsolutions I mainly encountered PET crystallization in vacuum forming and after weeks of trying to tune the process I gave up and switched to PETG. Doesn't crystallize and thanks to that it behaves much better around the temperatures where it softens for 3D printing/vacuum forming. I imagine that's why almost all the commercially available filaments are PETG instead of pure PET.
@@bzqp2 yep, I believe that is the case, and that is what holds Precious Plastics back from large scale recycling of PET too, time to make everything from HDPE I think! /s
Start the video over and take a shot every time he says, "As far as". I dare you. Comment and let me know how it goes. LMFAO!
2:23 Is that @3DPrintingNerd In the blue shirt? wow! (the guy in the background lol)