Recycle your failed 3D prints! Make new filament at home.
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 พ.ค. 2024
- I recycled my old PLA prints and made new filament out of it! Let me show you how I extruded my own material with the Filastruder.
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preciousplastic.com has developed an open shredder that could help you out and they do quite a lot of work with recycling plastic.
Deutscher oder
Good idea, you have a russian translate of this video? (I live from Russia and not good know English language)
Guten Tag wusste nicht das du aus Deutschland kommst aber mega cool und by the way mega gutes video hatte 2ganze mülleimer voll mit den Zeug weil ich noch nicht wirklich gut im 3D drucken bin
Man hört sehr den deutschen Akzent raus
Filament made out of failed print should be called "Failament".
Good one!
Dad? Is that you?
*kluk* nice
Yes. Just.... yes.
@@alexplorer He's still out getting those cigarettes.
Wish a system like this was cheaper. This should be a standard with everyone who uses 3D printers!
Perhaps hobby spaces should set something like this up together and then all of the members can drop off their failed prints for recycling.
Makes me think, there could be a place for a business here...send us your failed prints and we offer a discount on recycled filament.
This system is very rudimentary, I imagine building one would be pretty straight forward. Biggest hurdle would be temp control & engine speeds.
@@1992Bwhite yup! I imagine even a store front in a big city would even do good.
@@hedgehog3180 Damn, that's an awesome idea. Many printing enthusiasts, myself included, would gladly provide their scraps regardless of what they'd personally get out of it. I'm totally going to recommend this to my local maker space.
A few things as a plastic technician (im specialized in injection molding): you should be able to achive a black colour by adding about 2-3% clean powdered graphite. Ifyou dont want to add virgin material you should be able to use vibrations (maybe a rumblepack?) To loosen up the material for extruding. To reduce graining ect. And get a more homogenious filament i would try to sort the material either by spool(best way) or atleast by transparent/opake and light and dark colours
I was going to comment this, except with graphene powder. I add graphene powder to SLA resin, although I haven't done any tests on its effect. Do you know?
@@attilasooky8792 i just know that black colour normally gets done with carbon and graphene seems like the easiest clean source of carbon i can think of
A rumble pack you say?
Pulls out Nintendo 64 controller accessory.
@@wargex Any small motor with a weight that is off center should work.
@@Kara_Kay_Eschel "Rumble Pack" was the actual proper name of the controller accessory. I understand how vibrators work.
I feel that it's not quite practical at the moment, but environmentally it's very much so worth it
If you just have like a a spare bucket next to the printer just toss the failed pieces in and push them down a little then once it gets full look for this video in like a note app or something
Why is it worth it environmentally? The filastruder uses electricity and pla is biodegradable...
@@nateschmitz9827 PLA decomposes under specific conditions unlikely to be found in nature. It is technically biodegradable but not realistically. th-cam.com/video/X_Gh-3PQhiE/w-d-xo.html
@@nateschmitz9827 degradable, not biodegradable
@@nateschmitz9827 Interesting perspective. I'll have to understand more on the subject to have an opinion on it.
I really like the trash bag khaki color actually
it looks quite interesting! Can be used to print some decor elements and things like earrings.
it looks kinda like camo.
I love it
It's better than a regular plain color, I agree!
did u know khakhi is the name of colour which is similar to this one in Hindi language
Next time I visit Germany I can drop of a container of failed prints.
Be my guest, Simon.
@RCLLifeOn i can also recomend the DIY Extruder with awesome quality here on youtube th-cam.com/video/zaIoMLO7cak/w-d-xo.html
@RCLifeOn Simon! I can come to Trollhättan and pick it up :)
@@CNCKitchen beautiful man, not cheap enough yet.. I look at 3Dp ones :) but this is So good xx
I post in our group for you xx
Container for sale :)))
4:18 lol at the black plastic strip that ignoreres the 5mm rule and yolo straight through the sieve.
Hexagonal holes would help with this...some oversized parts up to 7mm are bound to slip through diagonally on a 5mm hole square grid. Hexagonal 5mm holes would only allow 5.7mm pieces if they perfectly slid into the corners. A little smaller than that and you guarantee nothing over 5 gets through.
@@VoltisArt No, it would not.
This is one of the things that interested me most about 3dprinting. For the longest time i couldn't really deal with the idea of just wasting so many failed 3d prints. I hope we're able to make failed print recycle kits much more accessible so that they're viewed as an essential accessory rather than a costly solution.
Soon we will have 3d printers with hoppers that you load up with drinking bottles and prints with the freshly created filament. No need for rolls It just melts it twice.. once to melt the bottles which then falls through a heated pipe into the hotend which then heats it to the appropriate printing temp.
who cares? PLA is literally milk
@@ChristopherJones16 hi Christopher, please message me on this subject
@@dthegthompson6217 I'm not sure how to message people on youtube.. I didnt know such a feature existed. Perhaps you can send me your email
I watched this a long time ago, when I was only dreaming of having a printer, now i'm actually researching for ways of recicle filament and even make my own from scratch. People like you are road openers for people like me. Thanks for making such useful videos!
@Alexandru ... I've never heard the expression 'road opener' before. Very good, I shall be using that in the future.
saaame
hey, did/do you have any success with Recycling?
@@michael__5647 No, not yet...
@@L3X369 what have you tried? I'm looking at building a system for PET in remote areas of 3rd world countries
This kind of setup would be a great for hackerspaces as with amount of scraps from the whole community it would actually pay for itself.
I would love a video or series of videos on "what can you do with 3D printing waste" exploring all the options that are available.
From an environmental standpoint, this should be the standard in all hackerspaces.
I’m going to burn my PLA, it’s .mostly just co2 and water....and plant a tree if you are worried about climate change.
etoile Trees are carbon neutral once they die. Do they not teach the carbon cycle at schools these days?
@@aeroscience9834 They can't teach the carbon cycle, otherwise kids would wise up about the global warming hoax and we can't have that. I remember back in high school when everyone was all about cow farts leading to the apocalypse because of Al Gore's fear mongering, our AP chem teacher outlined the equilibrium on why the "hole in the ozone layer" was impossible from a thermodynamic perspective (more UV radiation, more formation of ozone from diatomic oxygen).
@@aeroscience9834 Trees as individuals yes. However more forest cover equals a larger carbon sink. Also, forest soils sink carbon into the soil.
It would be cool to sort your scraps into different colors and feed them through so that your 3-D prints have distinct color stripes in them
i was thinking this too! like you can get two or three different colours such as blue, purple, pink and have a really cool filament
Please do a detailed series on the construction of this device.
Me and my old man made a filament extruder that works slightly differently, we have digital caliper that constantly checks the diameter of the filament and then use a "puller" that pulls the filament till it has the exact diameter we set. This means that we can make filaments ranging from 3mm to 1.75mm with the same setup, we just change the desired filament diameter and an arduino takes care of the rest through constant measurements and a PID loop
That's the proper way to do it and also how the professional machines do their job.
Maybe you can create a tutorial of how to DIY such?
Sounds great!
Would definitely like to see a tutorial on "how to" for your set up as well as a parts list.
thats cool.
Trash bag khaki looks like the rare Statue of Liberty LEGO color
That actually would be a good project to make using this stuff
That's the first thing that came to my mind as well ha ha ha, I think it's a beautiful color!
That one corner piece with this color is around 80$
can we 3D print LEGOs?
@@MarkusAtUMa yeah it works just fine
I admire your perseverance. Wish there was a new tool on the block for the less technically inclined (such as myself)
I really dig the slight different coloration per layer of your "Trash Bag Khaki" failament :D.
I think reusing most things is a good thing. So I think what you're doing is very cool. And I look forward to more from you.
Yeah but not when the recycling cost exceeds 10 times the cost of the new filament. 1kg in 10 hours, how much electricity will be used?
@@acerrusm Probably very little. Filastruder's website states 60 W peak. So 10 h is 0.6 kWh in the worst case. In my country it'd cost about *$0.10 for 1 kg*.
But even ignoring that, electricity can be produced from renewable resources unlike plastic filament. Moreover, wasted electricity usually turns into heat, while wasted plastic doesn't disappear magically¹. Heat may be a bad thing if you recycle when it's hot outside, but it should be feasible for most people to wait with recycling until winter, in which case you can save on heating your home/office so that recycling itself is very cheap. Theoretically, you could capture the heat and use it for a different purpose (e.g. heating water) but that would be tricky and probably not worth the hassle considering how little electricity extruding uses compared to heating water.
¹ except PLA because it is biodegradable in theory, but in practice it depends on the additives so I'd carefully check the dyes used before throwing it onto my compost pile
@@tuesss But what about shredding, cleaning, dehydration, winder, food the dude consumes while operating the process....? I bet it's not very efficient to do this on small scale. Also "renewable resources" is BS. How you gonna renew sun energy? Creating energy from sun disturbs nature as well, because this energy you're taking will otherwise be used to warm up the soil, air, plants... which in turn would affect other things... Getting energy from water or any other source is also not free. If you say water is renewable why petroleum is not?
@@Adiounys Clearly you're just trying to be anachronistic, but I'll humor you.
The food the user consumes while running it, would be consumed anyway. We gotta live. So just, don't
Shredding and the winder are all low powered items, the dehydrator will be slightly more 300-500W. These can all be powered by renewables, the same as the filament recycler.
Everything Tues has said is correct. Energy can be generated (from low-emission sources), plastic is a waste and quite hazardous to the environment, if mishandled. Reusing that waste is a smart idea.
Efficiency is a misnomer term too. You can have excellent efficiency, but still be wasteful. A perfect example is heat-exchangers (aka Air conditioners). Heat exchangers are often around 300% efficient. That's for every unit of energy you put into it, it can return 3 times that. Pretty good, right? But, we have so many A/Cs round the world, we are still using vast amounts of energy to power them, and often that energy goes to waste anyway (heating/cooling rooms without anyone in, leaking out open doors whatever). Heating and cooling can often be achieved passively, or via good design, reducing energy costs. So, while you may use a less efficient heater/cooler, you could achieve it with much, much less overall energy.
Now to my point on that. Yes, larger scale recycling of plastic is more efficient... but it's not really being done. So, some recycling at home, at less efficiency, is still better than none at all. Capiche?
Now onto your really ridiculous statements. Energy from the sun is considered free because it's a multi-billion year living object, that is going to do what it does, regardless of what the rest of the universe thinks. It will massively out last humankind so isn't worth factoring in.
Sunlight hitting solar panels would only affect plant life, if we installed it directly over existing plants, blocking their sun. That's not the case, is it? The panel absorbs the heat too, so the air still receives it's due. I'm not sure why you'd want to heat these things up though?
Petroleum isn't considered renewable, for the very reason that it can run out (we're already at far harder difficulties in extraction processes than we were even a decade or two ago - it will only get harder) and because it took hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years to decay and form into what we know of it now. We THEN have to refine it (more wasted energy) and THEN transport it. I could go on
@@MrVelociraptor75 The food you need to conusme while laying in bed is not the same as when you move. But that was just to point out that there a many small factors which togateher may have significant impact on overall outcome.
"Now to my point on that. Yes, larger scale recycling of plastic is more efficient... but it's not really being done."
I thought there were recyclic plastic in large scale already...
"Now onto your really ridiculous statements"
What statements were ridiculous?
"It will massively out last humankind so isn't worth factoring in."
This is ridiculous statement - how you know that?
"I'm not sure why you'd want to heat these things up though?"
So you really didn't get my point. I don't "want" to.
I was just saying that redirecting sun energy is affecting natural environment. The light that you turn into electricity is not turned into heat at the place. Changing air temperature creates wind.
On small scale it's not visible but if you could image that half of the planet's surface is covered with solar panels, it can change the climat significantly, but it's really hard to predict.
"Petroleum isn't considered renewable, for the very reason that it can run out"
You can say the very same thing about the sun.
"and because it took hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years to decay and form into what we know of it now"
Frist of all we don't know it for sure.
I'm not an astronomer but I just found out that star formation takes about 10 million years (astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/156/how-long-does-it-take-to-produce-a-star-why-does-it-take-that-long).
So you can say the same about the sun too, which saddly means your explanation failed.
Now, I see whe are diggin into details but original poit was about sense of recyclic filament and no matter what, this technique is preety useleess for almost all users. Even if cost of recycled filament is little smaller, you still need to recycle a LOT of it just to compensate for the machines used in process. And there are more negative practical factors but I don't have more time to write about them.
Saying all this I still think it's cool thing to do, but it's no more then a curio at this stage.
Lmao I don't even have a 3D printer. What am I doing here? 😂
Same
Curiosity? Also you have been watching TH-cam too long and have gone down the “this looks interesting.” hole
Well, i love people recycling stuff lol
Miss Weirdo same. But I really want to do this now 😂
I’m a Christians that’s y
Who else is watching even if they don’t have a 3D printer?
here!
A goose in a trench coat here
Wow you read my mind. Someday I may get a 3-d printing for my project but I was curious how I can recycle fragment.
Me
I think it's probably a bit of a sticking point for some of us that are wanting to get into 3D Printing, and fully understand that the first x amount of prints will most likely be unsuccessful / mess about prints and ideally would like to reuse them and not waste...
I would love to see an update on this one. I've been holding onto my failed prints too since this video was uploaded.
Are you still holding them?
I think a better idea would be to have a "professional " filament producing line at a hacker-space where people can produce their filament .
It's not that expensive to build your own: medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-home-for-cheap-6c908bb09922
the only issue with that would be enforcing material consistency only PLA, or only ABS to each filament machine
My scrap abs prints go in a jar with acetone to make abs glue.
How strong is it? What materials can it stick together?
I print a lot in ABS, so I'd be glad if I could find a use for all those supports and other scraps...
@@Bednar121 Well that is pretty hard to answer but lets give it a try. First tools i use for this are
1. Big container of acetone bought in bulk for cheap price as main storage to refill smaller one.
2. Smallest container size with easiest to open method that works for you, as you will be opening this very often
3. Glass container with metal cap that is air tight and over time you notice if seal material is acetone proof. Best one so far has been Maille mustard container, but its shape leaves things to be desired.
4. Injection needle where you scribe the end with file to create fault line, being EXTREMELY CAREFUL with ridiculously sharp end!!
(its sharp as scalpel so it easily goes trough to bone if you fuck up, so you might want to dull it first with sand paper or sanding stone to be safe, also as side note if you need sterile knife to open swollen boil for instance to drop the pressure and empty already infected content your self, injection needles end does the work, long as you know what you are doing).
Then just use pliers to snap the end and if possible flatten it and put inside some other metal scrap so no one else hurts them selfs with it and remove sharp/ rough edges with sand paper and you have small nozzle to inject acetone accurately where you need it.
Also syringe of you desired size, though 1ml syringe has been enough and it lasts long time as its pretty chemical resistant.
Now if you have simple layer separation on print that you can open and close by compressing and if all possible open it up fully, just apply acetone on the surfaces, give it bit time to soften the abs and then close it and its will be glued with in few minutes if plastic got sticky enough. Though as side note try to limit how much gets inside the print you have lower than 100% infill as it takes long time for acetone get out from the structure and it might even soften the whole print, though this can be useful too as you essentially acetone vapor bath prints inside surfaces.
If you have layer separation and warping then step one is as mentioned and then you can fill the gap with acetone, ABS putty/glue, but in incrementally as it takes time for acetone to gas out from the ABS. Putting too thick of a layer will cause surface to stiffen up, so gas cant escape easily and then you have gas pockets that expand. Quickest way to do get around this is to put on small quantity of paste, show little torch for it to burn out the gas inside and push the material back in its place right after. Repeat this enough times to fill the gap and finally smooth the surface by using the needle and applying acetone little by little into the area. With this i have saved countless failed prints, though surface most likely will turn bit of while so i would suggest you spray paint the part if its looks are important
For gluing two different prints together pretty much same rules apply as previously mentioned.
For gluing different materials together, well my printer is made from PLA and X-axis end stop adjuster i made from peace of failed print that i pretty much just melted and compressed with anvil, let it cool down, shaped with rasp, drill and tap for the M5 bolt and then just smooth the surfaces with acetone, let it stiffen and again with acetone melted the surface and pressed it to PLA nozzle carrier. After a hour it was stiff enough to use and has lasted 10 homings and 20 hours of print and i cant separate them with reasonable finger force. I could test this, but i dont have any other materials at the moment to test this with at the moment, but i need to look into it in future. What i theorize is that with different materials it depends on how liquid it is so it can fill minor holes and bumps effectively and how porous the materials are. You should be able to glue wood together, but i havent tested it. If you have some utility in mind just try small test peace and see your self, just make sure its gassed off completely before tress testing.
For ABS glue/putty i use rougly 1:1 mix. Supports melt much faster due large surface area, so you have batch of putty in hour to two hours. Stored putty will eventually gas out even in the jar acetone out and stiffen with in a month, but try to get the stiffen mass off from the glass surface so new acetone can sweep between the ABS and glass increasing surface area and you should have it ready for use next day/ on evening.
As safet precaution do note that acetone wapors are not best thing in the world for you body and skin contact is not that good thing ether. Your skin will dry and acetone will enter to your blood stream from said skin contact so it should be avoided if all possible. Back when i was working on car shop we had relatively smart/dumb system where spray guns were cleaned with acetone and skin contact caused me to get drunk/above average toxication, with huge head ache and with out the doubt it killed 20 IQ points while at it, so be careful, use in ventilated space and avoid skin contact.
This is just what i have found out. I use to build custom airsoft guns and i picked this method before i started to print parts.
100th like 😉
Filip Bednarowski please, follow the answer you’ve got.
@@Bednar121 deadly strong
I love this! I try to recycle everything possible when crafting, thank you for sharing.
Suggestion, First extrude at 3mm. Chop the 3mm filament into nurdles. This should mix the color better on the second extrusion for 1.75mm
You don't even need to chop it .. just make a big reel of 3mm as the first pass ti generate a feed material that is contiguous (unlike the shredded knurdles) .. then feed that through a 1.75 extruder for the second pass very much the same way metal wires are pulled making the diameter smaller each time. I think this could give a very consistent result. Actually you could do both steps in a single machine and skip spooling tbe 3mm if you make the machine a bit more complex
but that doesn't help with the color, you have to mix it again, for it
For more consistent color and composition you could do like the big manufacturers do and chop up your first extruded run into little even bits and then extrude it again. You could even do color mixing that way by separating your input colors first and batching them by themselves. Then you can add a ratio of colors to get something new. Definitely more work and time investment and probably beyond what a garage homebrew would want to mess with.
I immediately had the same idea. Why not make your own PLA pellets from the scraps first, and then extrude that into a filament?
My brother makes and sells pasta on a medium scale and the machine to make them works on a similar principle, with an auger that pushes the dough thru a die that makes the different shapes (like flat noodles, spaghettis, macaronis...). On the die there is a rotating knife that spins at just the right speed to cut the pasta the length you want. I'm pretty shure there are other possible ways to cut the pellets at the extruder, the pasta is already pretty hard when it gets out of the "nozzle" and it does not stick. So maybe using a shedder that cuts the cooled down rough filament into pellets is easyer to do with plastic than trying to cut it directly at the nozzle.
exactly. I think this would also improve colour consistency too if you have a huge amount of random colours being recycled (and want a uniform overall colour at the end).
You would have to use ABS for that, the PLA polymer chains break down too quickly. One time recycled PLA is much weaker than fresh PLA; this effect is not really noticeable with ABS.
@@among-us-99999 Yeah, that could be a problem. Mixing in some fresh pellets with your DIY pellets might help to keep the properties in the printable range. (Question is, how much fresh pellets would you need...) And having an extruder that uses more brute force and less temperature for the scrap-to-pellet extruder would probably help to keep the polymer in better shape too.
ƸӜƷ the printability is not really a problem. There is pure PET Filament available; it is just a little bit more brittle.
The glycol is added to prevent it from crystallizing when it melts and solidifies many times.
I used to work in a plastic injection-molding factory (making storage buckets). A lot of what you worked through is exactly how those systems worked in the first place. This was really cool to see. Thank you!
This video might be 3 years old but I'm finding it (and your follow-up video, which I saw first) both helpful in terms of the viability of recycling old prints. I've only been 3d printing for about 6 months but I knew as soon as I got the printer that I'd have some leftover plastic or failed models and I would absolutely find a way to recycle them - without any research of any sort into the community and whether it was something that had been done before. I keep all my failed prints and any scrap plastic larger than 2sq cm in size locked in a plastic storage tub which originally held my toy trains (or my Lego) from before I started living on my own and donated all my old toys.
I hope this becomes a thing! This is so important! Thank you for doing this.
The mixed colours don't matter if you are making a paintable miniature!
So I'd use that.
a neutral grey is better to paint anyways
and i actually like the trash bag khaki he made - i like to paint over grey/green instead of black xD
I think the non-uniform colour actually looks kinda nice.
You could do like an varigation with the colors and make a rather beautiful extrusion.
Thanks for this!! I had quite a bunch of failed prints and I did not know what to do and didn't want to throw it away, very much appreciated.
I’d like to build industrial machines for this purpose and set up a factory on several acres of land meant to do nothing but process recyclables.
We are at the ground floor of a new industry that is about to explode and recycling already manufactured products to clean up our environment will be top on our list of “things to do”. Anyone involved in this industry now will not only make a lot of money in the future but will be praised for helping humanity.
This is a great video on a great topic. I would love to see a cost benefit calculation with lots of graphs in your usual style, showing when it makes sense to accumulate more scrap and mix virgin material versus begin recycling. Also, adding extra instrumentation to your setup to automatically tune process parameters seems like a really important thing to investigate.
Is there some kind of service that can recycle old filaments for you? They could sell it for cheaper and it would be useful for prototyping when the colour isn't very important
I was thinking the exact same thing. Not only is this expensive but the cost of the shredder, the dehydrator, and the mixer make it even more so. Not to mention that it’s seriously time consuming. I hope such a service exists and that someone who knows of one will respond to your question. If there is none, there’s definitely a business opportunity there - depending on the economics of producing the filament.
Fusion filaments does, check their site
@@zkeepah Awesome! I'm glad that service exists
@@donnyferris5521 That looks like a pretty cheap model dehydrator, looks exactly like a model I can get at walmart for $40.
Thx 4 info, i`v looked up over 10 vids about extruders, yours the best of them, U r the smart kid, dont stop and move forward !
To shred better
1. Melt down the scrap
2. Pour into a mold or press into a mold if it is play dough consistency.
3. The mold should be a shape that is easy to chop
4. you come up with the best shape.
Or you could easily chop the new extrusion.
Another idea is to have a filament recycling business. Buy scraps from people in your city and sell the recycled product. Economy of scale could make it viable. People could ship scrap to you if they have enough.
Look at a pasta extruder. The ones that make small sized pasta . There is a spinning knife that cuts the extrusion as it comes out
The issue here is I think polymers lose strength each time its heated, so you don't wanna reheat it too many times.
@@WannabeCanadianDev True when not compressed
@@WannabeCanadianDev also, if you heat that sort of material excessively, it can burn and produce toxic gases, so it would require quite "The temperature control system" for that heater.
you don't even have to buy it
@@WannabeCanadianDev so how many times could you reuse the same filament with this recycling method.
It might be interesting to see a setup where the scraps are extruded into a 4-5mm diameter "filament" and then immediately chopped off with a rotating blade (while still soft) to make pellets that can then be used to feed the real filament extruder. I think this might help with consistency and it could also allow for bigger input scrap, maybe even a system where you don't have to shred it at all or only minimally since for the first extrusion part consistency does not matter.
I'm also very interested in a DIY version of this; I don't want to spend more on filament recycling than I did on my printer...
There is a pellet extruder design on thingiverse
Check thingiverse for the pellet extruder design .
Yes
WOW, 3.9m views, SO COOL that so many people are interested in recycling
Looks like a lot of work that is well worth it. I really like the look of Trash Bag Khaki and you prevented all of that plastic from ending up in the ocean for a little while longer
I'm sure it's worth it if (We) as creators put as much into it as we do our printers and other tools. That looks like what your doing. a good systematic approach. We cannot just create and not be concerned with the waste.
On the flip side when looking at injection molding, they go through thousands of failed parts when warming the machine up and getting the molds right. Your 3D printer is a machine that wastes very little in comparison to industrial manufacturing. My point being is that, banning straws, or spending exuberant amounts of money/energy/time on an inefficient process may not be the BEST way you could be helping the environment.
@@Chazz155511 as a past injection mold machinist i agree. Plus all the wasted material from the sprue channels even in normal operation.
i had to sit by an injection mold machine to cut the flashing off so we can get some parts to the client then take the mold back to improve it and remove/reduce flashing.
Your time is worth something, recycling prints is not savings you or the world anything.
I like the idea of recycling filament. I do think there needs to be some alternatives for the hardware to do it. $500 is ok for a person or small company that is printing a lot, but its too steep for a hobbyist.
Wayne McCormick Even old clearance filament from Chinese manufacturers under 5 dollars per kilo has significantly better quality than homemade. The only advantage of recycling filament at home is reducing land fill.
@@yyh1002 'only' can be enough. not everything has to come down to money, I hope.
PLA is completely biodegradable though and disposing of that is not an ecological problem.
That $500 would be better spent getting a low end resin printer. Honestly $500 is a total rip off for that stuff the parts alone to build it might barely add up to $200 when all is said and done.
Maybe if i had a dual extrusion setup, whereby i could use my recycled plastics as just support materials, that would satisfy my quest to reduce my carbon footprint as such. I agree though, for the hobbyist who prints less than 1kg per month, its just not worth the cost.
It’s a great effort. I really hope my young son’s world is one where the recyclables all get sorted in-house and sit in a storage system at home waiting for re-manufacturing into all the possible things we need day in day out. Ideal.
Beautiful. Effort appreciated not for money maybe but rather for conservation. Bravo!
That's pretty impressive that you can actually get a useable filament out of it, that's actually very good. In the future there will be more affordable techniques, this is very good recycling.
hah, I love the modified paper shredder and your other homebrew techniques, well done sir!
This is great!!! This is going to be a project of mine later down the road. For now I’ll keep old scraps!
What a smart guy! Very impressed with your work
Recycling my PLA scraps is like making bio diesel from the oil i use to fry my food, i just don't eat enough fried food. but if i go to a couple of local restaurants and get their oil too, now its becoming more worthwhile. So maybe a co-op of 3D print enthusiasts all putting in their scraps and selling it as recycled PLA at 1/2 market price or donating to the 3D volunteers printing PPE headgear.
A possible solution ror holding the size would be to employ an air knife or even a fan at the proper distance from the extruder to stiffen the PLA just as its 1.75mm (it will shrink more).
The last little extruder i worked on had a 2500HP (1850KW) motor and pumped out 5000 LBs (2250 KG) of acrylic polymer per hour 24/7 350 d/y.
exactly my thoughts. fry places used to (might still?) PAY recyclers to take it so free ++ material cost
Cool video, thanks! I don't know if anybody said this yet but perhaps as a last step try putting the sifted chunks through a coffee grinder on the coarsest setting. They're designed for creating regulated size particles without applying too much heat.
I love the color! There's people out there making filament from recycled plastic bottles, which I think are mostly PET. Not sure if some of that could be mixed with the PLA. The bottle filament is made from running a strip of plastic bottle through an extruder, so there's some uniformity to begin with, and less mess, but still some prep is required. Stick with yours. Great work. Nice video too!
Have you worked on this some more? One idea that came to mind to solve the shredding problem was to not shred the plastic at all, but making your own pellets. Melt it all together in your oven (you can mix it up while you're at it to get a uniform color, this also gets rid of any water and lots of the dirt, though you end up with the gunk accumulating on top, just like when casting metal) and run it through a "gravity-powered" extruder (basically a heated metal funnel) with a rotating blade underneath that cuts chunks off as they exit the nozzle (inspired by a play-doh machine 😅). These pellets need to cool off enough during their fall into your bucket to solidify, but that shouldn't be a big problem. If it is, let them fall through a piece of pipe with a fan at the bottom (blowing in from the side through a T-intersection) that blows air upwards. Slows down their fall and cools them at the same time.
I just worry that the newly formed pellets will just stick to the blade instead of falling into the wind tunnel...
The problem here is: the more often u heat plastic up, the shorter are the C chains ..
@@emkay1182 perhaps a binding agent can be added.. he used new pellets but that to me isnt too practical.. it would be ideal to find a cheaper solution.. perhaps a liquid.. like a glue/resin compound that when dried isnt brittle. Most likely adding fresh pellets would be the only solution but who knows.
you would still need to shred it because more massive parts will take longer to melt, causing inconsistent duration of heating
Not a 3d printer person but love the engineering and science aspect. Can not the pellets slide down a "marble run" type of trough to add more cooling time and bounce off an angled base to add a few final seconds and air exposure to the collection bin? The fan(s) for the collection bin can be placed behind angled base and the beads don't jam up the blades above a max collection level line?
Hey, thx for the info, it's awesome that It is possible to recicle filaments.
Could you make a strength comparisson next? Like bought filament vs DIY filament vs recicled?
You get ONE 3d printer for your birthday and the whole recommendedation section in youtube is full with 3d printer stuff😳🤣
lol same
I actually looked this up 😀 I already failed so many projects I have a little tub it’s only been a week
TH-cam is hearing your request
Yes it's a great effort and one of the kind .. well appreciated
This is awesome, I'll definitely be trying my hand at building a DIY version!Loving the channel!
Hey CNC Kitchen pro tip: built a singel component Static mixing tube before the nossle, then the plastic will get more uniform out of the nossle
I'd love to hear more about the energy involved, to shred, melt and extrude new filament. Running everything on solar panels would awesome in the sense that you could imagine printing "tools" to break them down after, recycle them and print different tools after. Do you have any idea about the efficiency ratio? 100g of scrap can make 100g of filament at the end?
was actually doing research on vapor smoothing for PLA ... but this was super useful to find U GAINED A SUB SIR!
I really want to build a 3d print farm with a recycling plant attached this video gave me alot to think about as far as how absolutely critical sorting and cleaning would be
I worked in a factory running industrial extruders for a couple months so this is a pretty neat video for me lol, the big ones aren't much different.
I assume they have better control on the filament width? How do they do that?
@@walkinmn checkout my blog: medium.com/endless-filament/make-filament-extruder-for-465-bbc0e8a74e74
@@walkinmn our extruder machine can control the diameter tolerance around +-0.02-0.03mm
Very nicely done. Would love to see an update to this and if you still use this set up and what improvements you have made since this video.
This was very cool. Brilliant setup and problem solving on your part. Of course all this points to the conclusion that recycling filament for individual use is extremely impractical, but the video was such great research, so I'm glad I got to see the whole process.
Sandcasting with lost PLA is truly amazing to me. Everything you use can easily be recycled. You print out your desired casting shape in PLA, make a mold with it, melt out the PLA, melt your metal and pour it into the mold. The scraps of the metalcasting and the melted waste PLA can be reused to a very high degree for the same process. As a mechanical engineer I can't help but be really excited about this extremely low material cost to hobby projects and prototyping concepts.
This is awesome. I'd love to see a diameter sensor and proper tensioning system. You could really be more aggressive with the flow rates if you had better feedback.
Excellent video! Let me suggest some ideas that could improve your results. My first suggestion is a residual classification criteria, not only by the polymer nature, but also by it's color (or color group). It will produce a much more homogeneous result. To avoid an excessive amount of residous, a periodic fragmentation rotine may be necessary.
Add a fresh polymer was a clever idea, like it is made successful in the glass industry. I hope made some constructive contribution.
Just had this pop up in my recommendations (guess I kinnda asked for it after doing a few dozen searches about 3D printing over the last three days).
But I have to say that I love the concept of this! Probably would get into something like this but the set-up required seems a bit over my head but I would love something like this if a proper/streamlined machine/set-up was made for this and I love the idea of recycling old otherwise useless prints/plastic. I hope to see more from this project in the future (if their hasn't already been improvements it)
Recycling is always a good thing, well done!
Another great video! Congrats for the first roll of StefaMent. I would love to see if this machine works with PET bottles. That would be real recycling.
Great video! How does the nonconsistent width of the extruded filament affect over/underextrusion? A short video about that would be helpful. Keep up the good work Stefan!
I like the engaging questions you asked in the end
I have just installed a Stealthburner toolhead, the black parts were made from Filastruder recycled plastic. Overextruded a bit but with a bit of force everything went together well.
This video inspired me to do this project! Haha. Oh also try recycle the pet bottle or add a color pigment too. That would be soooo cool. Love your vid btw.
good content, thanks for very detailed information.
I thought the color of the filament looks really nice. The slight ununiformed look is the cherry on top. Chef kiss!
Great video, I've been using the Polyformer for over a year and love it. To prep the bottle I've used my microwave, I put the a splash of water in the bottle then add the lid and microwave it for 30 seconds the steam will expand and perfectly soften the plastic. When done run it under water for a sec then let the steam out, I put the tip in the water so steam can cool down fast. Then run water inside the bottle to cool it down. Dry it out before cutting
thank you for the video , I have an Idea about creating a simple motorized filament cutter that will feed the extruded first batch and cut it every 5mm , this way you will have consistent pellets that can be dried then extruded again into a perfect filament .
its extra step but I guess it will produce best results regarding color ,thickness and texture .
Good idea.
is it ok to heat and melt the PLA several times? will the properties stay ok?
Plastics will start to degenerate over the melt cycles. That's why you usually add virgin pellets to reduce that effect.
CNC Kitchen that makes sense :)
@@CNCKitchen I found this filament cutter , th-cam.com/video/TULNdkCK_3U/w-d-xo.html I guess this will solve it
Very interesting! I think that using water to cool down the filament as soon as it leaves the "filastruder" might improve stability and speed. Also, a much bigger heating device might simplify the process as larger plastic pieces can be used. Another system might be required to get a constant material flow, maybe some kind of submerged pump...
I have no idea how hard it would be to drive the accumulated moisture out of the filament.
I like the video. a good way to make your own filament for test prints - much appreciated and cheers!
I dunno much about 3D printing, but I do like the color of the product made from the recycled material. Gives it a key look that indicates recycled.
Yes very worth the effort! what we need is a consumer version of this!
please do more in this direction ^.^
There is actually a machine you can buy that does this, but it's quite expensive. Might be worth it for companies that do a lot of 3D printing.
@@hakont.4960 Lookup Precious Plastic Open Project
Go DIY: medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-home-for-cheap-6c908bb09922
I love the character the recycled pla brings to the prints
Impressive video and very well produced. Thanks!
Another way to 3D print on the cheap is to use weed wacker line. You can get a shitton of the stuff for peanuts. It's nylon so the resulting quality is quite nice.
Seriously, does that work?
@@dickwhittington7321 As long as the diameter fits, your printer can print at temperatures above 260degrees and the line hasn't absorbed too much moisture in which case you can always look up ways to dry them back before printing
P.S I've had NO experience with it myself and I'm just spurring out whatever I gathered from elsewhere on the web
Someone try it
@@dickwhittington7321 Printing weed trimmer twine is difficult because its often saturated with moisture and not a uniform thickness. Another issue that came up within the last year is that the manufacturers of the stuff stopped making round twine and started making it in the shape of a pentagon, making it very difficult for the extruder to grab properly. I'm sure it cuts weeds better, but makes it worse for printing with.
I've tried printing with it before and had bad results. I had lots of problems with under-extrusion and pops due to the moisture flashing to steam in the nozzle. It also eventually clogged the nozzle up and I had to soak it in denatured alcohol for a week to get it unblocked.
If you could find some round trimmer line and put it in a vacuum desiccator to remove the moisture, it may work fine if you dialed in the settings right.
Thank you for showing this. This is really nice work. Two questions: Have you had a chance to try recycling pva? And, what if you melted the entire batch and used some sort of press to extrude? Maybe you wouldn't need to shred the scraps. Keep the entire setup in vacuum so you're not fighting air pressure and then it will automatically be dried for you. Just a thought, I haven't tried anything.
This is a great idea. I might give it a try for test prints or prototype phase prints
you could take some kind auger setup with a microcontroller to feed the chips and maybe get the chip size more consistent. great video. very useful information.
StefaMent - best filament name ever! Ganz großes Kino! 👍😄
Ohh my that fan with cutoff blades almost gave me a heart atack :O
For an RC-pilot... man this is torture! ;)
I think its quite useful for all those proof of concept prints made just to throw them away.
Love the color and nonuniformity of the color too.
You could sort the filament into different colours, and then you might have a more consistent texture.
at collecting time - but latest before sending that to the shredder.
Great effort with the recycling! I’ll be looking forward to create my own recycling filament system too! Would love to watch a video on how you did the recycling system very much! Thank you mate!
Bro you are doing really a good job. This thing is necessary for the world because after 3d printer invention, the plastic pollution is too high with your technique we can reduce. I hope you invent something like this which is helpful for mother nature.
That colour that you produced is a really nice shade of sage.
I think it should be possible to control the colour by sorting the plastics; that way, you could even end up with filament that shifts from one hue to another in a gradient fashion, even doing rainbows and such!
I use to work at a plastic injection mold shop. a few tips when recycling plastics. 1)if it hits the floor, it goes in the trash. this prevents contaminants. 2)unless you are going to make a black with an additive colorant, keep your plastics separate, i.e. green with green, red with red. You won't be as picky as we were, but we even went so far as separating by manufacturer, to maintain a consistency. 3) look for small plastic grinders. these will break things down into almost a pellet form. Also about grinding, you may want to think about getting individual shredders for each color/plastic type. Otherwise you will be spending hours cleaning everything to prevent cross contamination.
Great idea by the way. I have been debating on getting into 3D printing to help expand my ceramics making, and recycling and reusing hadn't even crossed my mind.
I'm in the industry as well. Micro recycling is extremely expensive, I see no possibility of people doing this en masse, save for a few enthusiasts. There could be a service that allows you to grind and extrude your filament on their machines. Here, the problem is the price of the service and the need to clean the machines after every batch. The other possibility would be for someone to buy the scraps, but then the chance of foreign material in the scraps is extremely high, and it would only take a very low quantity of foreign material in a batch of 100kg to contaminate it and render it worthless. So I'm guessing that's why nobody is doing it.
I'm quite interested in this idea hopefully I can get enough money to get my own set up for recycling filament as I think its a good idea to be able to reuse the left overs and failed prints.
Totally badass, and worth the effort!
Can you try recycling PET bottles? That would be really cool
Adam Smetana unfortunately that’s cost prohibitive in Germany since there is a 25ct. deposit on every pet bottle.
Exactly, I have to visit some Austrian friends soon and take some bottles back home.
@@CNCKitchen I can hook you up with some
@@CNCKitchen You could always see if a fan will send you some PET bottles. For example, they could find one that is relatively cylindrical cut off the top and bottom, then slit the sides to make them into sheets of plastic. That would be pretty cheap/easy to mail then.
CNC Kitchen would absolutely love a video on this. I don’t produce a lot of PLA waste but love the idea of home recycling PET. I would imagine bottles would be easier to crush and then shred to small pieces than failed prints.
Here in the uk there is no deposit. This is what would sell me a filastruder kit!