If you manage to spend time 3D printing at home or in another socially distant manner, there are still some ways that you can be sure to reduce your 3D printed waste, even without using recycled filament.
Since one of the main reasons to use 3D printing in industry is prototyping, it is common for 3D prints to go unused or to be improved upon and re-printed. This leads to many prototypes being thrown in the trash and increases the amount of waste involved in 3D printing.
Although it is easier said than done, one way to reduce this waste contribution is to check your model virtually for any possible issues. A thorough check of the virtual model, and many re-checks to ensure nothing was missed, can help to make sure that any material printed for this prototype will not be wasted.
Another main source of 3D-printed waste is support structures. Often, a model has a geometry such that a part needs to be printed which does not touch the print bed for support. In these cases, the model requires less densely printed material to be underneath the overhanging part in order to provide enough support for the part to be printed. Once the model is printed, the support material is removed and goes to waste.
This support material is already less dense than normal printed material, which does save some waste, but there are still ways to reduce this waste even more. The most effective way to reduce support material waste is to ensure that the print is aligned on the bed to reduce any overhanging area to as small as possible. In many cases, this can mean printing your object upside down or sideways, which will not have any effect on the finished product. In order to reduce support material waste as much as possible, before printing, be sure to test different orientations of your model on the print bed.
Most likely, the source that contributes the most 3D printed waste is failed prints. Because 3D prints can fail for a wide variety of reasons, it is not easy to be sure that a print you have started will finish successfully. In many cases, especially in research and education, failed prints are due to user error, modeling error, or issues with the physical 3D printer (such as the print not sticking properly to the print bed, filament getting tangled, etc.).
Because most of these issues are not easy to predict before they occur, the most effective way to reduce waste caused by failed 3D prints is to monitor your print and make sure to cancel the print right away if an issue occurs. If a failed print is left unattended, the printer will still try to finish the model and will end up extruding the total amount of filament planned to be used for the model before stopping. When this happens, you often end up with piles of wasted filament that do not look anything close to your model.
By monitoring the print and stopping it right away if anything goes wrong, you ensure that the rest of the filament that was planned to be used for the print does not go to waste, and thus you reduce the amount of wasted filament that would have been thrown away.
By checking your models virtually, optimizing the orientation of your models on the print bed, and monitoring the printing of your models, you can largely reduce your 3D printed waste, even without using recycled filament. In this way, we can print more sustainably and reduce our negative impacts on the environment while still learning and researching with the help of 3D modeling and printing.
This blog post was written by Brooke Chang.
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