A UK company provides a regional recycling loop for desktop 3D printing waste.
The company, 3D Printing Waste, is pitching a pretty straightforward idea: collect failed prints, supports, brims, rafts, purge towers and even empty spools, then sort, shred, process and return the material into usable plastic products, including 3D printer filament.
That sounds quite familiar. We’ve seen similar concepts before, most notably Recyclingfabrik in Germany. But the more interesting point here is geographic: these programs only really work when they are close enough to the waste source to make the logistics affordable.
3D Printing Waste provides some very interesting statistics about 3D printer waste, at least in the UK. You can extrapolate for your region and the world:
“In 2019 there were 168,000 3D printers installed in the UK – extrapolating this with the 24% per year 3D printing growth rate, it is conceivable that there could be in excess of 250,000 3D printers in in the UK.
If we assume the average 3D printer consumes 12 kg of plastic filament annually – the estimated 2021 UK 3D printing plastic demand could be 3 million kg.
With a wastage factor of up to 33%, plastic waste arising from 3D printing in the UK alone could possibly be as high as 1.5 million kg per year.”
Those figures seem to be from 2021, so today the number of 3D printers in the UK could be closing in on a million. The same story can be told in many countries.
According to the company’s description, the service accepts material from hobbyists, schools, universities and businesses. Participants receive either a 45L or 154L box to be fillled, must separate any non-PLA materials, and then send only PLA scraps in. The company then sorts and checks the material, removes obvious contaminants, shreds it, and processes it into several types of products:
- Recycling – supplying waste as feedstock for manufacturing processes such as Injection Moulding – reducing reliance on virgin polymers. (including 3D printer filament)
- Upcycling – utilising plastic waste as input material for the production of value-added creative products – giving plastic waste a new life.
- Pelletising – shredding plastic waste and then, melting and reforming as pellets for resale as secondary materials – increasing usage of recycled polymers.
In other words, this is a centralized, end-of-life service for PLA, which is probably the only financially feasible approach to 3D printer scrap recycling.
Why regional recycling matters
Desktop 3D printing generates a surprising amount of plastic waste, especially in education and prototyping environments. Failed prints are the obvious source, but support structures and calibration scraps add up quickly, and don’t forget those empty spools. Most of that material still ends up in general waste because municipal recycling streams usually can’t handle unknown printed polymers, mixed colors, additives or contamination. That’s the real problem these services are trying to address.
Regionality is critical in this scenario, because filament waste has relatively low value per weight. Shipping it long distances can cancel out both the environmental logic (generating transport CO2) and the business case (long distance shipping is expensive).
A local or national service has a way better chance: easier collection, lower transport cost, and a simpler story for schools or print farms trying to reduce their waste generation. You can also build trust more easily when the service is visibly nearby instead of being a questionable “send us your scraps” program in another country.
That may be why these operations seem to appear one region at a time. Germany has Recyclingfabrik. The UK has 3D Printing Waste. It would not be surprising to see similar ventures emerge in other dense desktop 3D printing markets where there are enough makerspaces, schools and small businesses to create steady feedstock.
Endless Recycling?
It’s inspiring to imagine these services would provide a means to endlessly recycle these materials, but there are some big issues with that.
It turns out that each time you extrude/pelletize/heat a thermoplastic you are damaging a proportion of its polymer molecules. Each cycle degrades the material a little bit more, and that changes the properties of the material. This is critical for 3D printer filament, which requires very consistent properties in order for print profiles to do their job. Some recycling solutions, like Creality’s latest desktop unit, require you to mix in some fresh pellets to overcome the degradation issue.
That’s why 3D Printing Waste offers more than just filament as their output products. They also offer to use the material to build parts, possibly using molding, which is less sensitive to material properties. They can divert a portion of the recycled material to products to “close the loop” and stop the degradation.
The vast number of 3D printers on the planet are now absolutely generating significant amounts of plastic waste, and it seems that regional recycling facilities could be one answer to that problem.
