Collaborate Disseminate
Plastics are unfortunately so cheap useful that they’ve ended up everywhere. They’re filling our landfills, polluting our rivers, and even infiltrating our food chain as microplastics. As much as we …read more Continue reading Recycling Tough Plastics Into Precursors With Some Smart Catalyst Chemistry
Polypropylene (PP) is a thermoplastic that has a number of properties that sets it apart from other thermoplastics which see common use with 3D printing, including PLA, ABS and nylon …read more Continue reading Getting Started With Polypropylene (PP) 3D Printing
Here’s a little eye-opener for you: next time you’re taking a walk, cast your eyes to the ground for a bit and see how far you can go without spotting …read more Continue reading Used Facemasks Turned into Rapid Antigen Tests with Injection Molding
3D printing is great for prototyping, and not bad for limited runs of parts. Unfortunately though it really doesn’t scale well beyond a few pieces, so when you’re ready for the mass market you will need to think about injection molding your parts. But something like that has to be farmed out, right? Maybe not, if you know a thing or two about designing your own injection molds.
The video below comes from [Dave Hakkens] by way of his Precious Plastic project, whose mission it is to put the means of plastic recycling into the hands of individuals, rather than …read more
Continue reading DIY Injection Mold Design for the Home Shop
Walk on almost any beach or look on the side of most roads and you’ll see the bottles, bags, and cast-off scraps of a polymeric alphabet soup – HDPE, PET, ABS, PP, PS. Municipal recycling programs might help, but what would really solve the problem would be decentralized recycling, and these open-source plastics recycling machines might just jump-start that effort.
We looked at [Precious Plastic] two years back, and their open-source plans for small-scale plastic recycling machines have come a long way since then. They currently include a shredder, a compression molder, an injection molder, and a filament extruder. The …read more
Continue reading Think Globally, Build Locally With These Open-Source Recycling Machines