3D printing, now this topic has become quite common. Whether it's the printer itself or the various technologies around 3D printing, it seems to embody the unique pride of the creator spirit - the machine with a sense of technology! Tidy consumables! Exquisite prints! However, the 3D printer we see today is not only untidy, but also somewhat "untidy" because it is a 3D printer using waste plastic as printing consumables.

Founder Sam Smith assembled a waste plastic crusher called Precious Plastic in 2016. The so-called Precious Plastic project is a cooperative project to promote plastic recycling and reuse. It provides some interesting plastic treatment equipment for fans around the world to assemble and use by themselves, including plastic. Material crusher, plastic wire drawing machine, plastic extruder and plastic compressor. The plastic crusher cuts waste plastics into small pieces, which can be put into the extruder and then manually injected into other small plastic shapes. The idea is good, but Sam finds it very difficult to twist the extruder out manually - just like a manual ice cream machine.

Combined with the basic concept of 3D printing, Sam transformed the manual plastic extruder into a fully automatic waste plastic printer. Like a 3D printer, the machine uses a stepper motor to control the direction of X and Y axes on the plane, and another stepper motor on Z axes to control the height of extruded melted plastics. These components are used by DIY 3D printers, so they can continue to be controlled by the master and software of the 3D printer. Except that the printer head used for melting and exporting waste plastics is the original product of the "precious plastics" extruder (used to melt common polypropylene and HDPE plastics), the rest is a standard 3D printer.

Now, this printer can print plastic products with lower precision. The melting characteristics of waste plastics are completely different from those of ordinary 3D printing consumables, which makes it very difficult to further improve the printing accuracy of waste plastics. Due to the limitation of machine structure, the current maximum print size is 24x 12x 4 (about 60x 30x10cm). As a "waste recycling" printer that can use 50% of the waste plastics, it has done a very good job!

Source from: https://creality3dpro.store/