Filabot Turns Your Plastic Junk Into Material for 3-D Printers | Wired Design |
Filabot promises to help turn your plastic crap into 3-D printed
fanciness, alleviating one of the biggest sustainability problems for
3-D printing.
Just over a year ago, Tyler McNaney was on break from college. “I was
surfing the internet as most college kids do, and I saw a video of 3-D
printing,” he says. “I was amazed and I learned all I could about it.”
Soon after, he owned one of his own. Not much longer after that, he
decided he wanted to make his own filament for it. Sadly, he was low on
cash. So he launched Filabot on Kickstarter.
For desktop 3-D printers to work, they need some kind of material to
work with. Most contemporary printers use plastic filament, available in
spools from various suppliers. Filabot reduces the need for that stuff.
Instead you can grind up household plastics or even past projects to
make new lines.
Think a meat grinder on top of a pasta maker and you get the general
idea. “Plastic extrusion is nothing new,” says McNaney in the
Kickstarter pitch video. “The only thing we’d like to do is adapt it to
the desktop environment.”
The need for something like this is enormous. The whole point of 3-D
printing is that you can do rapid prototyping and customization of
parts. This means that you can expect any given project to have lots of
unwanted prototypes, to say nothing of failed prints or other errors. Go
into any vibrant makerspace and you’ll find dozens of demo objects,
broken parts and failed experiment lying around, the detritus of
tinkering with objects. It’s similar to how in the early days of
computerized workspaces, the “paperless office” resulted in more paper being consumed as workers reprinted documents over and over.
“I am working on this because this is the next system that is needed
for at-home manufacturing,” says McNaney. “3-D printing is in its
infancy, and when coupled with a Filabot a 3-D printer will be a
complete closed-loop recycling system on your desk, office or school. I
also see a lot of potential for helping out third-world countries. With a
Filabot and a 3-D printer people can now make things as simple as a
fork or cup.”
Unlike some of the more outlandish promises
about how 3-D printing might save the world, McNaney’s project has a
point. The world is awash in disposable plastic containers like soda and
water bottles.
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