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A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste
21–30 of 57 posts
Re: A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste
#22So the author recycled 10 pounds of plastic, but used 8.5 pounds of glue to do so (184 sticks at 0.74 oz which seems to be average for glue sticks). Cool project, but that ratio seems very ineffective. Especially since there is a realistic chance this ends up in landfill within some decades anyway.
Most of the environmental cost of plastic happens when it’s made. Once it exists, burying it in landfill isn’t nearly as bad as many people think. 95+% of the carbon footprint of plastics comes from production and manufacturing.
Isn’t plastic nearly free as a raw material as a by product of fossil fuel production? I was always told it’s the opposite, plastic bags are better for the environment if disposed of properly because they’re so light weight to transport, didn’t need to be farmed, and companies basically give away the raw material because it would be more expensive to dispose of. A cotton bag needs to be reused upwards 1000x to be less impactful, or was I bamboozled?
Re: A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the environmental cost of plastic happens when it’s made. Once it exists, burying it in landfill isn’t nearly as bad as many people think. 95+% of the carbon footprint of plastics comes from production and manufacturing.
Isn’t plastic nearly free as a raw material as a by product of fossil fuel production? I was always told it’s the opposite, plastic bags are better for the environment if disposed of properly because they’re so light weight to transport, didn’t need to be farmed, and companies basically give away the raw material because it would be more expensive to dispose of. A cotton bag needs to be reused upwards 1000x to be les…
> Isn’t plastic nearly free as a raw material as a by product of fossil fuel production?
Yes and no. Oil is cracked down for lots of different things, but one of the things that people are really aiming for is ethane which can be used to make industrial ethanol, and a lot of plastics.
What you end up with to get there is lots of propane and butane, which is used as a fuel gas, but most of that ends up going up the flare stack because there's so much of it. We won't stop doing this while we still use plastics and fertiliser.
You need very clean propane or butane for things like cooking stoves, but you can run car engines on it just fine because they're so much less picky, and the exhaust gases are far cleaner than engines run on heavier fractions like oh maybe octane. This is why things like warehouse forklifts run on gas instead of diesel or petrol - you don't die if you breathe in the fumes, because there's no unburnt fuel or carbon monoxide, because it runs as lean as a vegan's dog.
Re: A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is also misleading. PLA plastic degrades slowly in the environment because it's highly crystalline and mechanically robust. But once it's fragmented, it's rapidly degraded. So it doesn't contribute to persistent microplastics. It also does not take 80 years in normal environmnets.
Well, my source (quoting some "Federal Environment Agency") says it does contribute to microplastics. Some googling seems to confirm this.
It depends on what you mean by "contribute". Multiple studies put half-life of PLA microplastics at a range between weeks to a month (e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02697... ), so they can't create a persistent hazard.
Re: A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste
#25So the author recycled 10 pounds of plastic, but used 8.5 pounds of glue to do so (184 sticks at 0.74 oz which seems to be average for glue sticks). Cool project, but that ratio seems very ineffective. Especially since there is a realistic chance this ends up in landfill within some decades anyway.
Like those "wood" tables that are 50% made of epoxy. It grinds my gears
Re: A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste
#26I guess this is meaningful recycling also because it occupied the author.
Otherwise the author would have started a different project and likely would have consumed more material.
Sibling comments focus on the end result and that it might end up in trash - but that was always the plan.
Re: A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste
#27So the author recycled 10 pounds of plastic, but used 8.5 pounds of glue to do so (184 sticks at 0.74 oz which seems to be average for glue sticks). Cool project, but that ratio seems very ineffective. Especially since there is a realistic chance this ends up in landfill within some decades anyway.
Like those "wood" tables that are 50% made of epoxy. It grinds my gears
I'm so glad that fad is over. My mother worked as a theatre artisan before retirement and it was, among other things, fumes from curing epoxy that caused numerous health issues down the line.
Re: A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste
#28next week my kids arts and crafts project is top news.
Share it now; I'm sure many people (with me included) would find it interesting, just like this post.
Re: A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the environmental cost of plastic happens when it’s made. Once it exists, burying it in landfill isn’t nearly as bad as many people think. 95+% of the carbon footprint of plastics comes from production and manufacturing.
Isn’t plastic nearly free as a raw material as a by product of fossil fuel production? I was always told it’s the opposite, plastic bags are better for the environment if disposed of properly because they’re so light weight to transport, didn’t need to be farmed, and companies basically give away the raw material because it would be more expensive to dispose of. A cotton bag needs to be reused upwards 1000x to be les…
We now know that, contrary to the cotton bag, they turn into microplastics which cost way more to remove from the environment than that reusable bag.
Re: A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste
#30So the author recycled 10 pounds of plastic, but used 8.5 pounds of glue to do so (184 sticks at 0.74 oz which seems to be average for glue sticks). Cool project, but that ratio seems very ineffective. Especially since there is a realistic chance this ends up in landfill within some decades anyway.
Most of the environmental cost of plastic happens when it’s made. Once it exists, burying it in landfill isn’t nearly as bad as many people think. 95+% of the carbon footprint of plastics comes from production and manufacturing.
It also burns quite well. If are in a location that burns trash in waste-to-energy plants you can get a decent amount of that energy back by throwing it away