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by econcon 2232 days ago
Converting Plastic Waste into 3d printer filament

Project: https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-ho...

Hopefully, this will reduce the use of virgin plastic for creating art pieces in 3d printing community and you might be able to create beautiful and useful things out of waste plastic while cleaning plastic waste from the environment.

It's a profitable business.

I worked on this in my free time during quarantine.

I want to make the project more accessible so people around the world can develop local recycling unit. There is lots of work which needs to be done including making parts more standardized, demonstrating how parts fight together in a visual way and also have a microcontroller firmware to control diameter of filament.

I need help from someone who can write Arduino code, mostly includes reading diameter from a guage and then change the motor speed of puller roller so that it stretches the filament if filament diameter is more than target and slows down the stretch if filament diameter is less than the target diameter. This needs PID control.

Telegram: alexfromtokyo

2 comments

I'm curious about how you're tackling some of the problems I've seen with prior recycled-plastic-to-filament projects. IIRC printer filament is very sensitive to moisture and impurities, which are hard to control for when using recycled materials (even when mixing with a proportion of virgin plastic)
I buy shredded waste plastic.

Which means = they take car dashboard, wash it with water/solvent then shred it into very tiny pieces.

I take it and dry it in oven then I put that in an airtight jar, and let it cool to room temperature over next 24 hours.

I mix it with some virgin plastic (also dried and stored in airtight container)

Then I pour the plastic into hopper and extrude it into filament.

This filament is made from recycled blue ABS: https://youtu.be/Xirli3qDJlU

I will like to participate. You will hear from me soon.