I’m surrounded by failed PLA prints…is it possible to find a good way to recycle it?  

RE: I’m surrounded by failed PLA prints…is it possible to find a good way to recycle it?

Used spools can be still useful by using a weight and substracting empty spool weight, and then knowing the filament density you can estimate how many meters are there left and plan print accordingly.

Another option is to join the filament fragments or just have a printer with filament runout sensor.

Anything else is rather not worth recycling unless you have something about 500kg of the plastic that is known to be recyclable by recycling facility or by talking to some companies which produce filaments and are willing to give some discount for the plastic in return. This is rather for smaller print farms.

Still you need to be very careful to avoid plastic type mixing in the same trash container.

There are some other options like grinders with extruders but usually initial cost is quite expensive, so this is also for print farms. In addition this is useful in order to generate a filament from factory granulate.

Notice that homemade filament producing machines may just not be able to produce long enough filament ( it would also require filament joining to get the proper spool) and the filament diameter may be uneven, which additionally increases the risk of the failed print.

Personally I print some functional parts and sometimes fragments can be used because those are usually some plates, beams, boxes etc. Anything else goes to the trash.

RE: I’m surrounded by failed PLA prints…is it possible to find a good way to recycle it?

Hi, friend, thanks for your reply. They are super comprehensive, yes, so I want to try use shredder and extruder to recycle it or even change the property of those filament. But yes, seem sometime the diameter is not very stable. So I was trying to find some company or product, but didnt find super suitable one. Maybe I can try to do a personal one!

And thanks for your reply,
Kind greeting from Jeddah! 😀

RE: I’m surrounded by failed PLA prints…is it possible to find a good way to recycle it?

Posted by: @xdg

So, I just wanna ask and have a casual talk here:

• Do you also throw away your failed prints/supports?
• Have you ever wanted to recycle filament at home?
• What stops you? Is it cost, quality, or something else?
• And I saw some DIY extruder, would ±0.03mm extrusion accuracy be good enough for most prints, or nah?

Unless you're a proper power user or running a small print farm, the amount of waste generated really doesn't warrant getting a filament recycling / new-filament-creating solution at home (at least for me). All the waste I've got might feel a lot, but if I'm being realistic it's still just like 1 spool of material in total. If I were to get a solution at home, it would just be for the fun of it as opposed to it actually being practical. CNC kitchen has used several, including a much cheaper DIY solution that seems to work great. 

What I currently do is gather all larger pieces of waste (failed prints, bigger support structures, etc) and I plan to send them into one of my local filament-recycling companies. But to be honest, I'm producing so little waste that the effort isn't really worth it. 

I'd say that ±0.03mm is good enough for many applications. If you're worried about the accuracy being too low, you can always set aside your own recycled filament and only use it for drafts / test prints where the dimensional accuracy isn't a problem. 

I did try melting scraps into sheets and blocks (domestic oven) for a local arts/maker project to use as raw materials and a few were used but PLA, for example, is hard to work with conventional tools.  I have toyed with the idea of melting scrap into moulds but captured air bubbles are tricky to deal with.

Most 'recycle into printable filament' projects do not break even until you are recycling many hundred spools ... and the other option of recycling eg. drinks bottles into filament require you to drink over a hundred gallons of fizzy liquid per spool.

If you have access to a hot composter, not a domestic heap, PLA does decompose in a few cycles.

Cheerio,

RE: I’m surrounded by failed PLA prints…is it possible to find a good way to recycle it?

Thanks for sharing, sincerely, my friend, and I am glad to see there are some people having the same vision that want to do something for those wastes. And yes, I heard some voices about "melting & injection" methodology, however the bubbles and melting tool is a issue. Now I am even thinking to build a standard solution for "melting & injection" in a afford price and desktop-size instead of "shredding & extruding & spooling". 

And thanks for your reply,
Kind greeting from Jeddah 🙂

RE: I’m surrounded by failed PLA prints…is it possible to find a good way to recycle it?

Hi, friend, sincerely thanks for your answer about the diameter matter. Yes, I am thinking the same, if only for user who has 1 to 2 printers, there are no so much wastes. Recycling is fun, but not very useful, especially current solution is expensive. For me, I come from the lab, massive failed prints and wastes because most of students is not very skillful in building 3D models. And the CNC kitchen website is so interesting, will explore further. Thanks for sharing.

And thanks for your reply,
Kind greeting from Jeddah 🙂

RE: I’m surrounded by failed PLA prints…is it possible to find a good way to recycle it?

XDG

here are two links that reference what you are looking at, he goes through both recycling as well as injection molding. I am not sure this will help you but I find it is always interesting to watch and see what others are doing.