{"id":8106,"date":"2015-06-18T19:16:48","date_gmt":"2015-06-18T19:16:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/?p=8106"},"modified":"2015-06-18T19:23:17","modified_gmt":"2015-06-18T19:23:17","slug":"3-d-printing-with-recycled-plastic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/2015\/06\/18\/3-d-printing-with-recycled-plastic\/","title":{"rendered":"3-D Printing with Recycled Plastic"},"content":{"rendered":"

3-D printing technology has advanced so greatly\u00a0that relatively inexpensive 3-D printers are now available and popping up all over the OSU Campus. The Valley Library recently made 3-D printing available to any student and also has a 24 hour web cam set-up for viewing of the articles being made (http:\/\/guides.library.oregonstate.edu\/3Dprinting<\/a>).<\/p>\n

One\u00a0major drawback at the moment is the plastic available to make articles. Both the type of plastic the Valley Library 3-D printer is specifically designed to use and the most common used plastic in other 3-D printing technology are plastics that are NOT recycled.\u00a0None of the Big Six Plastics (the six largest commodity plastics which are commonly recycled and labeled with recycling codes 1 through 6) are currently used in 3-D printing but there is no technological reason why they couldn\u2019t be used.\"3dprint2\"<\/p>\n

Our goal is to pull these plastic materials from the OSU recycled plastic waste stream, sort them into their individual recycling codes, shred them, and then process them using a laboratory scale plasticating extruder available in the CBEE Polymer Lab into a fiber to be used as the feed to a 3-D printer. The plasticating extruder, a common plastics processing piece of equipment, simply takes the solid polymer feed, melts it into a liquid, which then can be passed through a die to produce fiber of a desired diameter and length. We have this equipment in the lab and have recently purchased a MakerBot Replicator 2x 3-D printer (http:\/\/store.makerbot.com\/replicator2x<\/a>) like the one\u00a0currently in the Valley Library\u00a0(and at 7 other sites on the OSU campus, see them all here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

To date, we have been able to collect HDPE (#2), PP (#5) containers and PLA cups from the OSU waste stream. They have been sorted, shredded and washed. The plastics were fed to the plasticating extruder to produce filament suitable for the 3-D printer and have been successfully used as filament feed in the 3-D printer. However, since neither HDPE nor PP have ever been used in 3-D printing anywhere, we are still working on establishing the 3-D printing specifications for these materials. Once we have perfected the technology, we will make this material available to the Valley Library so students can make 3-D articles from recycled plastics, a much more sustainable way to produce articles which generally do not have stringent performance requirements.<\/p>\n

To learn more about 3-D Printing at Oregon State, visit their site here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

3-D printing technology has advanced so greatly\u00a0that relatively inexpensive 3-D printers are now available and popping up all over the OSU Campus. The Valley Library recently made 3-D printing available to any student and also has a 24 hour web cam set-up for viewing of the articles being made (http:\/\/guides.library.oregonstate.edu\/3Dprinting). One\u00a0major drawback at the moment […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6872,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1292116,1292119],"tags":[707756,1206],"class_list":["post-8106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campus-sustainability","category-waste-reduction","tag-3-d-printing","tag-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6872"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8106"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8121,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8106\/revisions\/8121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/ecologue\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}