A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste

https://www.instructables.com/A-Koi-Pond-Mosaic-Made-From-10-Pounds-of-3D-Printe/

by sudo_cowsay • 2 days ago

69 56 2 days ago

bogometer• 2 days ago

bravo! so much better than a landfill

atonse2• 2 days ago

The only comforting thing to me about the waste (apart from the fact that our personal 3d printer waste is a margin of error compared to industrial waste so honestly, just don’t worry about it), is that at least PLA is biodegradable.

ofrzeta4• 2 days ago

"the term biodegradable used by manufacturers and distributors can be somewhat misleading for the final consumer" https://www.beease.com.hk/post/how-long-does-pla-take-to-dec...

atonse2• 2 days ago

Interesting. I will do more research on this, thanks. But at the end of the day, even though it's tough for us to see the PLA poop, etc from our prints (I still generally don't like it), my point is that hobbyist plastic waste is basically negligible and making nearly zero difference.

I don't want people to see plastic waste from 3D printing and be discouraged to try it out as a hobby. I just got my first 3d printer 6 months ago (and I did all this biodegradable research mostly so my wife would feel comfortable with it). But the benefits of rewiring your brain in a manufacturing mindset, having the ability to create things, solve custom problems, etc, far outweigh the negligible (in the grand scheme of things) amount of waste compared to all the other plastic shit (toys, etc) the masses buy on amazon. That was my main point.

But it's good to know that it could still take 80 years, and is not as quickly biodegradable as originally thought.

cyberax2• 2 days ago

This is also misleading. PLA plastic degrades slowly in the environment because it's highly crystalline and mechanically robust.

But once it's fragmented, it's rapidly degraded. So it doesn't contribute to persistent microplastics.

It also does not take 80 years in normal environmnets.

esquire_900• 2 days ago

So the author recycled 10 pounds of plastic, but used 8.5 pounds of glue to do so (184 sticks at 0.74 oz which seems to be average for glue sticks).

Cool project, but that ratio seems very ineffective. Especially since there is a realistic chance this ends up in landfill within some decades anyway.

chneu• 2 days ago

Honestly wtf does the glue matter when people are going through plastic like it's nothing? Bringing up the glue is such a weird nitpick.

ofrzeta4• 2 days ago

When the ratio is almost 1:1 it is a bit more than a nit.

isoprophlex• 2 days ago

Do nothing: 10 pounds of filament poop has go to the landfill.

Do this thing: 10 pounds of filament poop still exists, + 8 pounds of glue sticks (which is basically a thermoplastic) used, to create something that's eventually going to end up in a landfill.

Are you being deliberately obtuse?

Recycling or reuse is not as useful as just not creating waste in the first place.

staplor• 2 days ago

hot glue is a petrochemical just like plastic.

sleepybrett2• 1 day ago

Why use glue at all, he should have done this using a 'stained glass' method. Build some kind of a frame for each area of color and then melt the filimant into it.

fhub• 2 days ago

Most of the environmental cost of plastic happens when it’s made. Once it exists, burying it in landfill isn’t nearly as bad as many people think.

95+% of the carbon footprint of plastics comes from production and manufacturing.

repeekad2• 2 days ago

Isn’t plastic nearly free as a raw material as a by product of fossil fuel production? I was always told it’s the opposite, plastic bags are better for the environment if disposed of properly because they’re so light weight to transport, didn’t need to be farmed, and companies basically give away the raw material because it would be more expensive to dispose of. A cotton bag needs to be reused upwards 1000x to be less impactful, or was I bamboozled?

wongarsu• 2 days ago

It also burns quite well. If are in a location that burns trash in waste-to-energy plants you can get a decent amount of that energy back by throwing it away

SirFatty• 1 day ago

"burying it in landfill isn’t nearly as bad as many people think."

I think you're full of shit.

lopis2• 2 days ago

Like those "wood" tables that are 50% made of epoxy. It grinds my gears

Tade02• 2 days ago

I'm so glad that fad is over. My mother worked as a theatre artisan before retirement and it was, among other things, fumes from curing epoxy that caused numerous health issues down the line.

s1artibartfast2• 1 day ago

What does that have to do with anything? The point is to do something cool with it.

It far more effective than building a collage with bought or new printed parts

o0void0o• 2 days ago

next week my kids arts and crafts project is top news.

thih92• 2 days ago

Share it now; I'm sure many people (with me included) would find it interesting, just like this post.

voidUpdate• 2 days ago

It's really annoying to me that shredders and filament makers are so expensive. I probably generate less waste than average from my printer, but it still pains me to have to just throw it away because I can't do anything productive with it

cucumber37328422• 1 day ago

If you heated with wood you could just burn it (and a whole lot of other things). Obviously not ideal above a certain population density...

t-3• 1 day ago

A filament extruder is essentially an injection molding extruder head without the press and mold - it's pretty advanced technology that requires integrating thermal design, mechanical components, and precise electronic monitoring and control. To get anything close to consistent output you're probably going to need a lot of special cutting and extrusion screws and probably some kind of additional pressurization system, and then the user still has to be disciplined about sorting and cleaning their plastics to get a probably mediocre output. Something like: https://www.instructables.com/Recycled-PLA-Sheets-From-3D-Pr... might be a more practical recycling paradigm for 3D printer waste.

repeekad2• 2 days ago

Why is the primary image blurry on mobile but high res if I rotate my phone horizontal?...

abanana• 2 days ago

I took a quick look because that sounds odd. They've made a mess of the article's image sizing - only 270px wide if the viewport is <768px. (That top image is 1024px wide on desktop.) There's so much wrong with that decision, regardless of the huge difference between 270 and 768, e.g. apparently not being aware of hardware pixel density on smartphones.

thih92• 2 days ago

I guess this is meaningful recycling also because it occupied the author.

Otherwise the author would have started a different project and likely would have consumed more material.

Sibling comments focus on the end result and that it might end up in trash - but that was always the plan.

segh• 1 day ago

Does no one else notice the LLM-speak tone of this article? Does no one else mind?

__MatrixMan__• 1 day ago

Using the prints themselves as glue rather than buying glue for them would make this a more interesting form of recycling.

I wonder if you could make a large hand-driven low-resolution 3d printer which, rather than running on filament, had a hopper that you fill with failed prints. Really just a giant hot glue gun.

lardosaurusrex• 1 day ago

generating an ima--

barf

vomit even.

joshmarlow• 1 day ago

A couple of years ago I listened to a Lex Fridman podcast with a researcher at the MIT Media Lab. I don't know the status of it, but the researcher spoke about how people in developing countries were experimenting with using local resources as 3D printer feedstock - things like ground-up sea shells - as a way of using local supply lines.

One of the most interesting things he said was that the current waste from 3D printing (and other technology) is really a sign of technical immaturity; nature repurposes everything - there is no trash in an ecosystem, only food for something else. Maybe we'll eventually learn to build infrastructure like that.

is_true• 1 day ago

Is this just delayed trash? At some point someone will throw it out.

It would be great to be able to create "art" and add something that degrades it.

syntheticnature• 1 day ago

In the end everything is delayed trash. Some trash is recyclable/compostable/etc.

bdcravens• 1 day ago

I save all waste from 3d printing with good intentions.

I did back the Creality shredder and filament maker that hasn't shipped yet, but I'm optimistic. (https://crowdfunding.creality.com/)

I also bought a pellet extruder kit, which can use shredded PLA waste, but haven't gotten around to putting it on a printer. (https://greenboy3d.de/)

I've had pretty good luck taking waste and melting it into silicone molds. Doable with a cheap toaster oven and purge waste and other scraps (though you need to break down larger waste)

For those who want to recycle filament without doing the work themselves, this person has such a project (and maybe there are others out there): https://erikaprintsshop.wordpress.com/

gia_ferrari• 1 day ago

For most people, waste -> filament recycling is a red herring (cost and time). Happy to see people thinking more laterally. I use an old toaster oven ($5 used) to fabricate round stock (fill old aluminum drink cans with waste, melt it down) and sheet stock (crush the melt between flat surfaces). I then use this material for all sorts of things (it makes beautiful marbled vases on the lathe, for example). There's almost zero net waste in this process (I recycle the cans).

More uses I have in mind:

- PLA drift sleeves for go karts (they're typically ABS, which, if you care about plastic in the environment, is a laughably bad choice for something which is intended to be ground to a fine powder in use)

- Stool (melt plastic into shallow cylindrical mold, push legs into melt)

- Decorative trim/picture frames (need a profiled router bit)

etc etc

Check Brothers Make on YT, they are the source of my inspiration.

A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste

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