Sustainable 3D Prints With Decomposable Filaments
Sustainable 3D Prints With Decomposable Filaments
What if you could design your 3D print to fall apart on purpose? That’s the curious promise of a new paper from CHI 2025, which brings a serious hacker vibe to the sustainability problem of multi-m…
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This doesn't strike me as particularly sustainable at all? It just makes the object come apart into smaller objects, right? But they're still objects and still made of the same material they would've been otherwise... Just switch to PHA, it's actually for real compostable and more sustainably produced as well.
It's for separating materials for recycling, not compost.
Ohh this probably makes more sense in places other than where I live. Nothing here gets recycled at all unfortunately... Were the larger objects unable to be recycled otherwise?
Mixed material objects cannot (generally) be recycled. This is focused on multi-material prints, so you can easily split out your PLA and TPU etc. for recycling. Also good if you're directly recycling into new filament.
I looked PHA up. Color Fab offers some at a fairly reasonable price, but limited colors. It seems an interesting choice for printing. I do like the heat resistance of >120C. The printing temp range is low and pretty narrow and needs hair spray. I wonder if it's comparable with PEI print sheets.
But it still has a price hard time competing with the $11US per kilo of PLA brands like eSun.
We use it very regularly in our makerspace, although yeah like you say, the supply and color availability is lacking unfortunately. Fingers crossed it gets better as more people show an interest in it
Yeah, the $36+ per kilo is a lot, but from a "vote with your dollar" perspective, I may stomach it in hopes that the price goes down, and the color options improve. I don't print as often as I used to, so that makes it easier.