The is the second post by summer intern Alex Peraza in a series on recycling plastic into 3D printer filament using Filabot equipment.  See here for the first post.

 

Materials

To start with, we will be focusing on trying to recover the most common 3D printing waste product: PLA. We use PLA for the vast majority of prototypes and student builds, so we have a lot of it. Next, we will look at ABS, PC-ABS, and PETG, which are the more common materials used for end-use parts. Lastly, we will look into repurposing PET and HDPE plastic waste such as bottles and packaging into printer filament, as well as experiment with custom blends and fillers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We also have quite a bit of this stringy stuff. Since this is PLA, it could just be trashed or composted, but we want to see if we can do anythng with it. Heating it up with a heat gun and crushing it into a ~2” flat bar seemed to work fairly well in the Reclaimer.

Grinding

The first step in recycling old parts, supports and scrap filament is to break it down into small enough pieces that it can be fed into the extruder. The Filabot Reclaimer has two grinding sides, the Shredder and the Granulator. Parts under 3” in all directions can be fed into the shredder, whose output can be fed directly into the Granulator side. Since the hoppers for both are side by side, you have to manually dump the shredded material into the granulator. Anything over 3” must be broken down by hand, but a canvas drop cloth and a large mallet work well for that (and for taking out your frustrations on your failed prints!).  We would be interested in hearing from anyone who has found a better solution, though.  Maybe a small electric chipper/shredder?

Here’s the result of running our scrap PLA through the Filabot Reclaimer.