So I have a small box full of failed projects, off pieces like supports, and small lengths of filament. Are there any places these can be sent for recycling?
There are some places you can find, I will link a couple below. They don’t really give you anything back for the material you provide, but at least it keeps it out of the bin.
https://shop.terracycle.com/en-CA – this one can be used for PLA only
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I was looking at some of the filament extruding options and while it will eventually pay for itself, the cost to get started. Not to mention the learning curve and space required with controlled ambient air flow and temperature probably mean an exponentially higher learning curve than what’s required to build a 3D printer with a few upgrades by yourself!.
Not 100% of the scrap you put in is going to be turned into a filament which you can reprint and since you can get a kilogram of pla of even the good stuff if you’re not picky on color for under $30 Canadian it’ll take a really long time to make your money back. Not to mention most of the extruders don’t include the shredding process which is a whole nother Beast. Probably more straightforward with a much of a learning curve put together, but still quite costly. The cheapest I could find was double the price of another three just to shred the material.
But I’m also curious what other people have discovered on this topic where instead of throwing it away, I’ve been doing the same storing it in tins sorted by the type.
I would like to at least find some easy way to somewhat shredded in a way that it would be usable to feed through a funnel of some type. Maybe like a plastic pop bottle size hole without the incredibly time consuming tedious method of using scissors or a Dremel tool.
For the purposes of making molds out of plaster that I could put the stuff in with little air gaps between the flakes so that I could put it into an oven and just have it melt into a solid brick, as a way of reusing the filament for very basic shapes.
Or I was even thinking of pausing a print before I put s the tops on and then inserting the flakes into the hollow parts of infill and using a soldering pen to poke into the flakes. So that they become tacky and stick together/ fuse to the infill walls as a way of getting kind of 100% infill out of your scrap.
The only method I found that kind of works well without the tediousness is to put the filament on a piece of high temperature resistant silicone and put it in a toaster oven with a piece of tin foil on top, and when it gets soft and becomes a singular piece before it cools down all the way you roll it up, and let it fuse back together again and it will kind of look like a large turd LOL.
But at least it allows me to use a miter saw and keep chopping off the end. Going blade thickness level cuts every time and I can recapture most of that as flakes by sweeping up the shop desk around the saw station.