Our Recycling Journey

We’ve all have heard of the importance of recycling plastic and why it is beneficial to the earth. Studies have shown that the average amount of plastic waste each year can circle the earth four times. Did you know that you can save money by shredding your failed 3D prints and other plastics into new filament? Curious to learn how you can optimally recycle plastic? Follow our recycling journey – where we guide you through.

What is plastic, actually?

The term “plastic” or polymer refers to a rather simple concept, which can be easily explained with some simplified chemistry. 

Our materials team at 3devo constantly carries out material experiments to see which materials can and cannot be turned into filament. You can imagine that by doing all those experiments we developed a pile of failed filament and failed 3D prints. So, the materials team decided to go around the office and to see what other plastic waste we had laying around. Once all the plastic waste was collected, the materials team separated the plastic pile. Sadly, not all plastic can be recycled.

There are multiple steps behind recycling plastic and, in our case, recycling plastic into filament. To make things a bit easier, we have created a mini series on our YouTube channel for you. In these series we are going to show you all the steps that need to be taken in order to recycle your plastic waste.

What’s next?

Every week we will take you further on our journey on how to recycle plastic waste into filament. To give you a little sneak peak, these are the steps we will discuss:

• Collecting Plastics – how to identify which plastic can and cannot be recycled
• Shredding Plastics – how to shred your plastic waste
• Extruding Plastics – how to extrude your shredded plastic waste into filament
• 3D Printing Plastics – how you can turn your plastic waste filament into 3D prints

Besides the mini series on YouTube we will also explain each step further on our blog, so keep an eye out for that too.

Excited to start this journey with us? You can make a head start and educate yourself a bit further on plastic and recycling by reading an interesting article by National Geographic .

We hope to see you back next week. In the meantime, keep on recycling and save up all your plastic waste!