Three engineering student and a professor designed and built a “RepRapable”, which was part of an open source project at Michigan Technological University. The device can turn waste plastic into high-quality 3D printing filament, hence the name, which comes from the term adopted by the 3D printer community to describe a replicating rapid-prototyper (“RepRap”) that can print its own components to recreate itself. The “RepRapable” recyclebot can generate the filament needed to replicate itself on any RepRap 3D printer. The designers were in the Department of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics and made their plans available in 2018 under a Creative Commons license in the journal HardwareX. These plans include a detailed materials list, step-by-step build and operation instructions, assembly photographs and illustrations and a link to a source file repository, maintained on Open Science Framework. This was a large breakthrough because the RepRapable is a type of “recyclebot” and there are plenty that currently exist; however, the RepRapable costs about $700 for the components rather than the current systems that range from six to tens of thousands of dollars. The Michigan Tech creators say that the machine can replace the filament made by commercial pellets for roughly 22 percent of the cost and cut the amount of energy used in creating new filament by about 90 percent. It can also fabricate the recycled waste plastic into filament for 2.5 cents per kilogram, about a thousand times less than the cost of commercial filament. This will amount to an uptick in the amount of people who have access to recycle their plastic waste to make this filament, especially considering it only takes 24 hours to build. Their plan will aid in the ever growing need for cost-effective recycling as the planet continues to be polluted. It is the type of technological advance that will help move the world forward in the pursuit of low energy/cost, high recyclable methods of producing materials. As a student at Ohio State, I hope to be involved in projects that are similar to this one, so that I can aid in the process of making the world a sustainable place for both myself and future generations to come.
Citation:
Woern, A., McCaslin, J., Pringle, A., & Pearce, J. M. (2018). RepRapable Recyclebot: Open source 3-D printable extruder for converting plastic to 3-D printing filament. HardwareX, 4.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ohx.2018.e00026
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/materials_fp/177