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A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste

instructables.com

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Re: A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste

#31

Post by usrusr »

Tade0 wrote: post #29
repeekad wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not when they are properly used as a fossil fuel source. As a fossil fuel source that just happened to also make itself useful in other ways on the voyage from mine to smokestack. As long as we still burn coal for electricity and/or heat it's just stupid to bury plastics (or, worse, let it slowly decay unburied)

Re: A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste

#32

Post by abanana »

repeekad wrote: post #21

Why is the primary image blurry on mobile but high res if I rotate my phone horizontal?...

I took a quick look because that sounds odd. They've made a mess of the article's image sizing - only 270px wide if the viewport is <768px. (That top image is 1024px wide on desktop.) There's so much wrong with that decision, regardless of the huge difference between 270 and 768, e.g. apparently not being aware of hardware pixel density on smartphones.

Re: A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste

#33

Post by PaulHoule »

usrusr wrote: post #31
Tade0 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not when they are properly used as a fossil fuel source. As a fossil fuel source that just happened to also make itself useful in other ways on the voyage from mine to smokestack. As long as we still burn coal for electricity and/or heat it's just stupid to bury plastics (or, worse, let it slowly decay unburied)

It wouldn’t be so bad if you buried it and it stayed buried it, but whatever disposal technology you use it doesn’t work if the plastic is never properly disposed of. Even if people are really careful, for instance, some single use plastics are going to blow away in the wind. Something shoddily made in the bottom of a pond is going to come apart and shed plastics, etc.

Re: A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste

#34

Post by SirFatty »

fhub wrote: post #17
esquire_900 wrote: post #4

So 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.

"burying it in landfill isn’t nearly as bad as many people think."

I think you're full of shit.

Re: A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste

#35

Post by cucumber3732842 »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #23
repeekad wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fl…

>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.

The amount of gas flared globally adds up to little over 1% of global energy production. I know that doesn't sound like much but we're talking like terawatts. It truly is a mind boggling amount of energy that gets wasted because we simply can't get it to users cheap enough.

Re: A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste

#36

Post by cucumber3732842 »

voidUpdate wrote: post #20

It's really annoying to me that shredders and filament makers are so expensive. I probably generate less waste than average from my printer, but it still pains me to have to just throw it away because I can't do anything productive with it

If you heated with wood you could just burn it (and a whole lot of other things). Obviously not ideal above a certain population density...

Re: A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste

#37

Post by t-3 »

voidUpdate wrote: post #20

It's really annoying to me that shredders and filament makers are so expensive. I probably generate less waste than average from my printer, but it still pains me to have to just throw it away because I can't do anything productive with it

A filament extruder is essentially an injection molding extruder head without the press and mold - it's pretty advanced technology that requires integrating thermal design, mechanical components, and precise electronic monitoring and control. To get anything close to consistent output you're probably going to need a lot of special cutting and extrusion screws and probably some kind of additional pressurization system, and then the user still has to be disciplined about sorting and cleaning their plastics to get a probably mediocre output. Something like: https://www.instructables.com/Recycled-PLA-Sheets-From-3D-Pr... might be a more practical recycling paradigm for 3D printer waste.

Re: A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste

#38

Post by xattt »

Tade0 wrote: post #27
lopis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am curious about the down-the-line effects of fumes from printing PLA and PETG. Reddit posts suggest no ill effects, but it hasn’t been long enough in the hobbyist world.

Re: A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste

#39

Post by ErroneousBosh »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #35
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fl…

>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. The amount of gas flared globally adds up to little over 1% of global energy production. I know that doesn't sound like much but we're talking like terawatts. It truly is a mi…

> because we simply can't get it to users cheap enough.

Or we can't get it clean enough to use as say cooking gas or aerosol propellant.

Stick it in cars, they'll burn any old shite and emit water and carbon dioxide - two terrible greenhouse gases, for sure, but you'll extract useful work from it instead of literally just heating the atmosphere for the fun of it.

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