Formlabs is offering to test the safety of any 3D printer resin.
The company in 2024 issued a very surprising report on the hazards of typical 3D printer resins. They performed extensive chemical testing on a series of common materials and found, among other things, that the vast majority of them contained ACMO, with the chemical name 4-Acryloylmorpholine. This turns out to be a dangerous material that even carries US EPA warnings.
ACMO was likely included in these resins to reduce their manufacturing cost, which may — or may not — have been passed on to the buyer.
Their report led eventually to the company’s release of their Alpha resins, which do not use ACMO, and are far safer than almost any other 3D printer resin on the market. Eventually, Formlabs even announced a low-cost desktop resin 3D printer of their own in the past month.
The Formlabs resin report is available to the public, and I strongly encourage you to read it. You will find many commonly used resins listed, and some of them are made from very significant proportions of toxic ACMO.
But that’s old news. What seems to be new is that their testing program continues.
In a recent LinkedIn post, Formlabs CRO Nick Graham writes:
“Send us your hazardous resin!
Seriously. We’ll test it and publish the results.”
I don’t think he means that you would literally package up your wet, half-used bottle of toxic resin and courier it directly to his office. Instead, they are basically looking for tips on what they should test next.
They even have a form you can use for this purpose, the “Resin Safety Request Form”.
The form includes the usual tombstone fields (name, email, etc.) and also the brand and name of the specific resin product in question.
Then they ask what your concern might be, and you can select from:
- Skin irritation potential (liquid state)
- Skin irritation potential (after curing)
- VOC emissions
- Compliance of SBS
- Or something else
All of these should be of concern, but there may be priorities involved. If, for example, you are producing parts that people are in physical contact with, you’d better know what might happen. On the other hand, if you are a school with a resin 3D printer, you may be more concerned with emissions in the classroom.
Either way, it is better to know than not.
The original report had information on 28 different resins, but now I see the same report includes 37 resins. So they are indeed continuing to test resins and present their findings.
If you are using an unusual 3D printer resin that is not on their list, why not let them know about it and we can all see the results?
