This seems a bit strawman to me, no? The people who are doing crazy builds with hundreds of parts are often doing it specifically for your social media impression. Most of the stuff I print on my Prusa is small parts for my bikes or my car. Little missing pieces of fixtures around the house. If I’m ever printing something feckless it’s because a friend really wanted a 3d articulated slug. I will say though, the waste plastic from edges, supports, failed builds, etc adds up over time and it’s dead-end waste like most other plastic. I have several paper grocery bags full of the stuff. But that’s exactly why I don’t like printing feckless crap.
I’ve seen a video of someone experimentally recycling that into new filament. Unfortunately, there’s probably not a commercial product for that.
Also, if I recall correctly, they had an issue with keeping it at constant width.
I did a little reading up on it. Apparently it’s hard to make it work unless all the pieces you’re melting are the same size, and any impurity, even dust, can cause issues. And that’s before you even get to the point where you’re trying to extrude a perfectly sized filament.
Also, given how cheap the filament is, there probably isn’t enough incentive to do this on a commercial scale. Otherwise someone could design a machine that could be sold to shops that sold 3d-printing stuff so they could recycle filament for their customers.
This seems a bit strawman to me, no? The people who are doing crazy builds with hundreds of parts are often doing it specifically for your social media impression. Most of the stuff I print on my Prusa is small parts for my bikes or my car. Little missing pieces of fixtures around the house. If I’m ever printing something feckless it’s because a friend really wanted a 3d articulated slug. I will say though, the waste plastic from edges, supports, failed builds, etc adds up over time and it’s dead-end waste like most other plastic. I have several paper grocery bags full of the stuff. But that’s exactly why I don’t like printing feckless crap.
I’ve seen a video of someone experimentally recycling that into new filament. Unfortunately, there’s probably not a commercial product for that.
Also, if I recall correctly, they had an issue with keeping it at constant width.
I did a little reading up on it. Apparently it’s hard to make it work unless all the pieces you’re melting are the same size, and any impurity, even dust, can cause issues. And that’s before you even get to the point where you’re trying to extrude a perfectly sized filament.
Also, given how cheap the filament is, there probably isn’t enough incentive to do this on a commercial scale. Otherwise someone could design a machine that could be sold to shops that sold 3d-printing stuff so they could recycle filament for their customers.
There are a couple of commercial solutions out there, and the fancier ones have sensors that measure the width and makes adjustments on the fly
They are quite pricey though, the cheapest one i found (a couple of years ago) was priced at like 10k$