Lessons In Printer Poop Recycling
A single hotend multi-color printing causes a lot of poop. Every time they change filaments, they’ve got to purge the single nozzle, which results in a huge number of technicolor “purge poops” which on some machines are even ejected out a chute at the back of the printer. They almost write themselves.
What’s not a joke, though, is the sheer mass of plastic waste this can produce. [Stefan] You can also find out more about us on our website. CNC Kitchen He was able to produce over a kilogram of printer poop in order to print a 500 gram multi-color image. In order to do this, he began looking for ways of turning printer poops into filament. His results were interesting. These tests were conducted using a 3Devo Composer commercial-scale filament extruder. However, they should work with any filament extruder – even homebrew. It became apparent that a few simple tips could be used. The first thing to note is that purge poops were too large and stringy for a filament extruder. They had to be shred.
Second, everything needs to be very clean — no cross-contamination with plastics other than PLA, no metal bits in the chopped-up plastic bits, and most importantly, no water contamination. [Stefan]’s first batch of recycled filament came from purge poops that had been sitting around a while, and sucked a lot of water vapor from the air. Purge poops that were hot and fresh after a print job worked best. Again, ick.
[Stefan] The process was finally mastered to produce decent filaments that didn’t jam the printers or cause poor print quality. It was even a nice color. Of course, this depends entirely on the colors that you choose to start with. Granted, not everyone has access to a fancy filament extruder like his, so this may not be practical for everyone, but it at least shows that there’s a path to reducing the waste stream from any printer, especially multi-material ones.
