10
votes
What should I do with waste PLA from 3d printing?
I have a box of scrap parts of PLA left over from 3D printing and I'm wondering what to do with them. PLA can apparently biodegrade but only in really specific conditions I don't think I can achieve like keeping it at 60c. I know there is a device that can turn the scraps in to new filament but its way too expensive for me. What should with this stuff?
Check your local trash company to see if they can compost or recycle pla. If they can do either, do that. My company does neither, so I have been passive-aggressively putting it in recycle anyway.
Isn't putting waste into recycling just a way to make sure nothing gets recycled?
The company has to sort the recycling anyway. Many other things get in that can't be recycled by mistake. They sort it out and send it to the landfill. But as long as the company has to spend some money on processing pla, it makes it relatively cheaper to process it correctly.
Requiring pre-sorting of recycling drives me crazy. Recycling plants have to pre-sort stuff before processing it anyways so why the fuck do I need to do their job for them? It's just making me waste additional trash bags and buy additional containers I shouldn't need. It also incentivizes people who don't want to recycle to not do so because it's too hard.
From what I can tell plastic sorting is all done manually so only a few of the high value plastics are picked out and most of the plastic that could be recycled ends up in landfill because it costs too much to sort.
You can get a hot compost bin and do 60C composting at home. I have one, and tried putting waste 3d prints in it (I tried to break them up into small bits). They did seem to disappear - I didn't find any traces of the smaller bits in the output compost. The larger bits were still there but degraded - I put them through again and they disappeared.
Alternatively some 3d filament suppliers accept colour-sorted waste back and melt it down into other products.
Recycling Fabrik have come up in recent years, you can ship your waste PLA to them and they will recycle it into new filament.