Colloquia

Summary

Distributed Recycling for Additive Manufacturing is a concept encouraging local recycling of waste into products with the help of a 3d printer. Underserved-communities could benefit greatly from Distributed Recycling for Additive Manufacturing, by locally recycling waste into usable filament, which can be used to print a variety of useful products for cheap. In this research, filament created from locally recycled waste is explored as an alternative to commercially available filament. A literature search was conducted to better understand recycling processes and to select an ideal plastic to use for this filament, by looking at commonly printed and commonly recycled plastics. PET turned out to be the ideal material for this, as it is widely available, well recyclable, and able to be 3d printed. To find out if locally recycled PET filament could serve as a viable alternative, several experiments were set up to produce PET filament and to compare its mechanical properties to commercially available filaments.

PET bottles were collected, cleaned, shredded, and dried. To mimic a small scale local recycling set-up, various budget-friendly methods were attempted. Then, an attempt was made to extrude PET filament from the shredded bottles using a Filament Maker. Unfortunately, this was not successful, and no printable filament could be produced. Virgin and recycled PETG filament were printed into tensile testing specimens using an FDM printer and mechanically tested. It was found that both materials performed fairly similarly, and recycled PETG filament could serve as a replacement to conventional PETG filament. From this research, the conclusion is drawn that locally recycling PET into filament is not feasible for under-served communities.