Hello everyone, to anyone who has any information on the subject, thank you in advance.
It’s been a while since I researched recycling of failed prints. I am currently only interested in the shredding aspect of it and was wondering if anyone knows of anywhere in NYC that will locally take waste prints and either return you the ground plastic or just recycle it for you. If not, how much interest is there locally, for a place to drop off pre-sorted (color, material, etc) failed prints and have them return you the crushed plastic to then be used to make filament or anything else you would want or do with it. Or just a place that will take that and recycle it for you since we’re not supposed to be disposing of this plastic along with other trash and it also can’t be recycled with other plastics. Currently only considering starting with PLA.
Also I am aware of filabot, but that is a huge investment since they currently only sell an industrial grinder. The only other option I am aware of is the Mini Shredder that is custom made in the UK, and this just seems really expensive because it needs to be imported.
Another question is if someone knows a place int he US that will make something like the Mini Shredder for a reasonable price?
@Mark_Rehorst Good question, as of right now all i am trying to accomplish is reduce this huge amount of waste plastic I seem to be accumulating. I figured there has to be other people in the same situation as me and are weary of spending too much on the equipment needed to do anything about it. I really want to take it one step at a time since time is a limited commodity for me right now.
To answer that question, in my head I see this as a very small operation, person brings in their failures, comes back at a later time, get’s handed back their actual ground up plastic and they do with it what they will, or they don’t pick anything up and the operation willing to do this then decides what to do with it. Be that making it into filament or selling it for someone else to do whatever they want with the stuff, with the disclaimer of where it came from of course.
Not trying to start a business or anything here. Just refusing to add to the problem, I’ve even stopped my current projects until I figure something out.
100% recycled plastic can, from what I understand, be a bit tough but you can do a mix of recycled plastic with virgin plastic. Finding the highest consistently good balance of recycled to virgin would take some work, but should be doable. You might end up with some variability in terms of pigment that way, but for home use I’d be fine with that.
Cleaning is an interesting challenge though. Especially if you don’t know for sure what the plastic has been through. I’d imagine agitation in some kind of water + detergent solution could do pretty well, but then you’d need to do a lot of drying. Especially with extremely hydrophilic plastics.
Vacuum drying, ie stuffing a vacuum pot full of shredded cleaned plastic with couple containers of dessicant for a while, might do it. But I have a feeling it would be slow and either require agitation, or periodic opening up and mixing, to get uniform drying. Although that may not be true, I’m just guessing at the moment.
It seems like a problem that could be tackled, but also a problem that’s a lot bigger than just asking “how can I recycle my prints back into filament?” would initially seem to imply.
You might actually have better luck recycling failed prints into injection molding material… but even then, you’d run into a similar set of problems, so solving the problem for one use case would likely solve it for the other.
It’s something I’ve given thought to occasionally as well, and something I’ll probably try my hand at eventually… but then, I like building weird things that may never work entirely properly just for the sake of trying and learning.
@Mark_Rehorst Maybe I was too vague. Really just looking for information on a grinder or a way to source one for not a crazy amount. This is currently for personal use, not looking to quit my day job or anything.
Also I see your concerns, producing quality, usable filament from recycled plastics is quite the endeavor to take on without considering all aspects of it and is a topic I have researched quite a bit. BUT it’s not what I am looking to do at the time.
@Stephen_Baird If i really had the space I’d go as far as hand washing and sun drying with some kind of directed beam of sunlight. Somewhere along the lines of how you can cook a hotdog or how coffee beans beans are dried.
Seems like most any grinder could do the job. Could probably rig up a trash disosal on your bench and feed it water with PLA parts in it. That may even help with the cleaning aspect…
But as the others said, not sure what you would do with it then.
PLA is a bioplastic though, so if you’re really worried about waste I’d look into composting it.
In my bits of investigation into the options, I haven’t found anything quite like what you’re looking for @cris_luna . The closest is the Mini Shredder, which seems quite expensive for what you get. I also dislike some of the design choices made in it.
I put together an OpenSCAD model of a potential alternative, built on the same idea but with the modifications I felt would improve its function and integrate some of what I had learned from bigger industrial shredders, but have yet to do much more than that. Pricing out the materials for it, you’d probably be looking at $150-200 in raw materials costs, plus whatever the machining time would be.
I found a couple local machine shops that say they take small orders like what I have in mind, but haven’t gone so far as to get a quote on it yet. Unfortunately I don’t have my own CNC (yet… someday…) so I wouldn’t be able to machine my own prototype version although before I take the step of getting a quote I would print my model as a proof of concept and sanity check on the design.
@Stephen_Baird Interesting, I have read about people wanting to source the teeth from china and having other parts machined locally, hardened, etc…But I have no experience with any of that so that would be quite a time sink. From the sounds of it, your shredder might also fall into the 400$ range. If your improvements are really that amazing that doesn’t sounds insane. I wouldn’t mind printing up the prototype if it’s something you would be willing to take further. Guessing once the design is ready one would purchase the required materials and go to a local machine shop? or maybe something online?
@Tom_Nardi Yup, the composting thing has always been of interest to me, sadly that would be hard living in an apartment with limited space with no access to a yard or outdoors area.
I hadn’t really given much thought to sourcing pieces from China and doing local fine processing, that would probably drop the price (especially if done in bulk) but I’m not sure by how much it would drop the price. My sourcing of materials was all from US sources, so they could probably be had cheaper abroad, that’s true.
I will, eventually, in my haphazard way, advance the shredder project and when it’s good enough to work I’ll open source it. But for the moment it’s just a render and a dream.
As for composting PLA: From what I understand, it requires high temperature composting, the sort of thing you only get in large industrial or city-wide scale composting operations and not something you’ll get in backyard compost piles.
@Stephen_Baird Alas, this is all but a dream for now then. Maybe I can find someone who managed to source the parts for the mini grinder and maybe they’d be willing to share some details on how to go about doing it myself.
