How toxic is PLA and PETG printing?  

RE: How toxic is PLA and PETG printing?

Check: Emissions from materials in 3D printing https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/85538

ABS -----> Aldehydes, acetone, diethyl phthalate, ethylbenzene, styrene, xylenes, etc.[14, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27]

PLA ----> Acethyladehyde, butadiene, propionic acid, toluene, etc.[28, 29]

Most of these are hardcore carcinogens, lung irritants and CNS toxins. Level 1 toxins.

You can go ahead and inhale them all you like, PLA is not safer than ABS at all. They're both seriously toxic. They're BAD for you.

Original text here: https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/65oh2x/how_toxic_are_pla_fumes_exactly/?rdt=45204&onetap_auto=true&one_tap=true

RE: How toxic is PLA and PETG printing?

so need to take action soon.

Flowers give off a lot of VOCs. Same with food cooking. Volatile organic compounds aren't necessarily dangerous or bad. Without characterization of the actual chemicals involved, and what the toxic level is, you're just panicking without data.

As another poster said, if you have a print farm with hundreds of printers, this is something you should be aware of. If you run a single printer in your home, the VOC levels, whatever they are, aren't likely to have an adverse health effect.

RE:

I think the reality is somewhere in between these two positions above. There has been a publication that indicated that one can get above the chronical or even acute limits of various problematic VOCs with a single 3d printer in a closed room. Non of that is likely to kill you any time soon but it may negatively impact your health, cause for example headache or increase likelihood for cancer. Good news for smokers though, the negative effects from a single 3d printer will be next to nothing compared to smoking. 

Interestingly, just as much as VOCs also ultrafine particles are of concern. A 3d printer emits a lot of them. Generally speaking the faster and hotter you print, the more problematic it is. And ABS/ASA/Nylon are more problematic than PLA, due to Styrene emissions (in the first two cases) and hotter printing conditions. 

I think with a bit of common sense these risks are tolerable. Put your printer in a room where you don't live or sleep, keep that room well ventilated during printing. And if you have a printing enclosure with closed loop active carbon and particle filter, your exposure will be most likely not above legal limits. Indeed, if you fry and roast stuff, you may be even exposed to similar levels of nasty VOCs. 

RE: How toxic is PLA and PETG printing?

Would a Prusa enclosure with their HEPA filter be enough?

RE:

Depends on what you mean by enough. Generally I would say no. It helps but it is not enough.

Ensure good ventilation in the room where the printer is, during printing and especially when opening the enclosure. Preferably that room should not be your living room (and if it is there, you shouldn't spend the entire time in the same room, during printing) and definitely not your bed room. 

RE: How toxic is PLA and PETG printing?

Agree, best just use enclosure and suck the air out of the room via vent in the window

Ensure good ventilation in the room where the printer is, during printing

Er, no - for another reason.  Drafts are bad news for printing - see the threads here about warping.

If you are worried, ventilate the space for  while *after* printing and delay entering until enough air changes have removed printing side-products.

But I won't begin to worry until medical histories begin to implicate FDM - I am not aware of any cases yet.

Cheerio,

RE:

I ventilate a small room by using an 2 fan "window" box (that exhausts air) that goes across the bottom of a window that closes down on it. My printer is about 10 feet away and I'm sure it does cause some drafts.. But in printing PETG and PLA I have not noticed any warping.  My bed temps on an MK3S+ is 65/85 for PLA/PETG and I occasionally use glue stick . If I did notice some warping, I'd do as suggested above.. print and then exhaust, but generally having the fan on doesn't affect the prints in my room.. Just try it to see what happens. I think my next printer will need to be more enclosed with better venting capability to outside. I used to work in that same room, but no longer do while printing.. I just shut the door and turn on the fan.

RE:

Posted by: @diem

Ensure good ventilation in the room where the printer is, during printing

Er, no - for another reason.  Drafts are bad news for printing - see the threads here about warping.

If you are worried, ventilate the space for  while *after* printing and delay entering until enough air changes have removed printing side-products.

But I won't begin to worry until medical histories begin to implicate FDM - I am not aware of any cases yet.

Cheerio,

I should have added that my recommendation is for printing with enclosure. With PLA you should print with doors open of course but there drafts are much less of an issue, in fact people usually try to maximimize airflow and keep temperatures relatively close to room temperature. I never experienced any issues while priting PLA in an open enclosure while venting, in regards to layer adhesion or warping. 

Of course, one can keep everything closed while printing, let everything accumulate but stay outside and then vent after the print very thoroughly before one spends longer time in the room. It propabably has a similar effect. The advantage with continuously venting is however that problematic VOCs and ultra fine particles can not even accumulate that much to begin with. Unless you are printing mostly or exclusively PLA having an enclosure is IMHO advisable anyway. For PETG it definitely helps regarding layer adhesion and said warping. 

So I do stand to my recommendation but there are additional things to consider of course. 

PS: For the enclosure of course, an active carbon and particle filter circulatory filtration system is a plus. If you print in an enclosure you will want to let the part cool down after print anyway and during that time the filtration system can reduce the load in the enclosure as well, before opening it.

RE:

Based on personal experience and subjective feeliness I am 100% convinced that FDM printing (even with lower-polluting PLAs) have health deleterious effects.

Based on my air quality measurer that I've got next to the 3D printer, I can say for certain that my personal subjective feeliness was correct. 

Good news is that with the Prusa Enclosure + the air filter running, the increase in VOC and PM (air pollutants) are negligible / not even detectable. So that's a fully acceptable, albeit noisy, solution. 

RE: How toxic is PLA and PETG printing?

Yes.. I would agree.. However, with the proliferation of 3D printing in home environments and aimed for youth, they should be sold with a venting solution. I would almost go out on a limb and say that if 3D printing proliferates even more, this will be a legislated safety necessity. This is where Prusa missed the boat is a huge way, by not releasing a core XY, instead of MK4 so that it would include a frame that could be more easily vented. An assembled MK4 is $2k in Canada, with the basic Prusa enclosure $700.. or the improved air filtration enclosure @$1k. An X1C WITH AMS is $1900 here (with cheaper shipping). For around $1000 LESS you get a printer that not only has an enclosure, that you can more easily add additional filtration, but also has a better (than MMU3) AMS unit. I have an MK3S+ and I love it.. but I'd never buy a new or upgrade to a printer without better air filtration/management than an open frame. 

RE: How toxic is PLA and PETG printing?

I was always concerned about the health issues on the 3d printing.

I have built an enclosure with an exhaust fan and I have attached a carbon filter on top of that.

I always wear a respirator when I open the enclosure just to be safe. I think, like everything else we use, it is too soon to know what exactly the downsides will be to this exciting hobby of 3d printing.

RE: How toxic is PLA and PETG printing?

This reminds me of Prop 65.  According to Prop 65m everything in the world is going to give you cancer.

RE: How toxic is PLA and PETG printing?

I get the feeling that fast food and cigarettes (especially e-cigs) are more dangerous in daily basis

 Especially e-cigarettes are real nightmare, also environmentally.

There's so many benefits of printing in enclosure that I believe we will see more and more printers with embedded enclosures. 

Also making your own enclosure is pretty easy, but the pain is in the details, especially if you need to cut holes in the transparent windows.

RE:

Prop 65 is indeed a really stupid piece of legislation. REACH in the EU is a much better one, even if it is not without flaws either. 

The reason why Prop 65 is not only useless but actually making things worse, is that if everything is labelled dangerous nothing is treated as dangerous. The ambition has to be however to educate people to treat the most dangerous materials with more care than other materials. For that one has to limit the number of "most dangerous" materials to a manageable size and those that are really terribly dangerous need to be taken out of circulation as much as possible. That's what REACH is about, it is not about annoying end customers but updating risk analysis of problematic chemicals and actually restricting and outlawing the most dangerous ones, of course with consideration to risk and availability of alternatives. Ironically enough the US also benefits from REACH as China enacted a similar piece of legislation labelled by some as "China REACH", to keep manufacturing compliant with the EU market. 

RE:

Posted by: @_kaszpir_

Also making your own enclosure is pretty easy, but the pain is in the details, especially if you need to cut holes in the transparent windows.

There are various custom cut panel services, at least in Europe (for example: https://kunststoffplattenonline.de/ ), you can order panels with defined drilled holes or upload a fully custom vector shape and get a laser cut panel straight from the shop. Cutting costs are pretty fair and affordable. That makes designing and building your own custom enclosures a piece of cake. 

RE: How toxic is PLA and PETG printing?

Also making your own enclosure is pretty easy, but the pain is in the details, especially if you need to cut holes in the transparent windows.

Or... you could design an enclosure that has a minimum of cutting with thin (1.5mm) plexiglass.

RE: How toxic is PLA and PETG printing?

Including the labels required by prop 65. And the box they come in.

RE:

MSDS_Bambu_PETG_Translucent

Here ya all go,  I cannot fathom why so much debate about any of this the Material safety  data sheets for PETG are hyperlinked above read enjoy and print on it perfectly safe as the air you breath on your front porch!  That is not to say you cant exhaust it if you want to do what you feel is best for you.  PLA / PLA-CF /PETG & PETG-CF are fine to print.  You can find all this info from where ever you buy your filament from, I use Bambu &  Polymaker for standard plastics and x3DTECH for nylons / pekk-A & pssu   

RE: How toxic is PLA and PETG printing?

Here is something to ponder while you debate, because we might not know the true toxicity yet. But there is other things we do know.

Cancer is the second leading cause of death behind heart disease. Of Cancers, the biggest killer, by far, is lung cancer. Even when you remove everyone who has ever smoked cigarettes, it still kills 30,000 to 40,000 people a year, so it still pays to be cautious.