Does any of you have any experience with this? I’m looking at the Felfil Evo pellet extruder which seems like an acceptable option. One thing I don’t understand. Why are the shredder and spooler so ungodly expensive?
I mean, can’t you just use an old blender to grind pieces down far enough for the pellet extruder? The finer the better no? Airborne microplastic may be a concern at some point.
Also the spooler. Is that more complicated than a stepper motor that runs at a certain RPM spinning the spool around? With perhaps a mechanism that slows down a bit after X rotations to compensate for the spool getting thicker. Nothing an Arduino can’t handle. Also don’t grip the spool that tightly so pull strength is more or less equal.
Both the spooler and shredder individually cost more than a pellet extruder does…
When I looked into this a couple of years back, the prices for ready-made filament extrusion setups looked like the target market was small business rather than individuals. And the recommended DIY method for breaking down plastic if you didn’t have a machine shop was to get a paper shredder with metal blades (one of the models capable of shredding optical disks).
Much simpler to recycle printer waste into slab material. Or send it to a manufacturer that does recycling. Unless you’re generating at least tens of kilos of waste a year, you’re unlikely to break even any time soon by re-extruding, assuming the resulting filament is usable at all (ensuring consistent diameter and near-perfectly round cross-section is probably a PITA).
I would love for a small business to have one near me. I would literally give them the scraps for free. I’ve just been saving the chunks in a bin
I think in most cases you have to pay the price of postage. Some of the companies will offer you an incentive like free or discounted spools of recycled filament to offset this, but the only one I’ve found that’s in Canada with me ( filaments.ca ) does not. Printerior Designs in the US apparently does (never dealt with them myself), and there are a couple in the EU.
Yeah Id give away all my filament do whatever with it in the name of environmentalism but I’m not paying for a company to sell my off cuts
Alternatively, what’s impossible for an individual might be possible for a group. A makerspace with enough members who are into 3D printing might be able to break even on a macerator, extruder, and spooler in a reasonable amount of time by reselling the filament. Say maybe 30 people each producing a kg of waste PLA per year?
Hmm. Pinning some numbers on this . . . The Filabot EX2 is an extrusion and spooling setup for $6,560.70 USD . Plus the bill of parts for a DIY macerator . . . let’s call it $7000, because round numbers are nice. $1000 a year would pay this off in a not-unreasonable amount of time. So you’d need to produce 100 spools at $10 or 50 spools at $20. If you’re only clearing 30kg of waste per year, and selling 1kg spools at $20, that’s $600/year and about 12 years to pay off the rig. Still not completely out of the question, I guess.
Yeah but you’re not selling waste spools at $20 when new pla is $10 to $20
I admit you’d be limiting your market to people who consider “helping the environment feels good” to be worth at least $5 if you price the spools at $20 USD. If you want to price it lower, you need more waste, though. So for now, the economics don’t really work out unless we’re talking about really large groups of hobbyist printers, or waste from a business. 🤷
Yeah and you’d be limited to a brown/black ish color if your don’t sort your waste by color