In countries where PET bottles do not get slapped with an additional fee that induces you to return it for recycling and said fee back, the resulting piles of discarded bottles have led many enterprising individuals to consider using them to make their own PETG filament. One big question of course is just how much work it is to create even a single 1 kg spool of PETG, which is a question that [PETCraft] was only too happy to answer in a recent video.
With the channel owner clearly living in a country without a bottle deposit, it’s very easy to see PET bottles strewn about as trash, including multi-liter water bottles. As a very recycling-focused channel, this provides an excellent opportunity to show how they go about recycling these into filament.
The detailed process is covered in previous videos in the channel, but essentially they are first heat-smoothed to make them much easier to cut into thin strips. This is done with a very DIY cutter – also constructed from mostly salvaged and other common parts – before the strips are passed through the heated extruder nozzle of the DIY filament extruder before being wound onto spools.
Ultimately it took thirteen 5 liter bottles, a 10 L, two 8 L and a single 1.5 L bottle to hit the 1 kg target, which is quite an impressive amount of work. The next challenge will be to actually print with it, which will – naturally – be done with a DIY 3D printer made from salvaged parts and an Arduino board.
The good news about recycling bottles like this into filament is that basically all PET bottles will actually be PETG anyway, as the glycol adds the flexibility that’s essential in water bottles so that they do not shatter or rip easily. The real question you have to ask yourself is whether cleaning, cutting and spooling dozens of bottles is worth saving perhaps 10-20 bucks on a commercial spool of 1 kg PETG filament.
How many PET bottle are required to make 1kg of PETG filament? Zero. This is not the same material.
Even if close… The PETG filament has a stable composition, while your PET bottles have just enough cyclohexanedimethanol to make them strong enough to support the one use they are intended to survive. There are so many different bottle’s thickness, transparency, color, … that mixing it in a single spool linearly is the best way for print issues with different behaving part on when oozed.
Indeed you’d want to add an extra step of pelleting the filaments made of random PET things to then extrude a well mixed filament if you really really need that consistency. But ultimately I rather doubt it will be a real problem, you but the good reel for those projects that absolutely must look perfect and use your recycled accepting the minor ooze, layer adhesion, bubbles etc it may develop as it doesn’t matter.
One 1.5L bottle makes 1KG filament?
Heavy water weighs a lot man.
No. It took ALL of those bottles to reach 1 kg.
Sure if your Western time doesn’t worth anything.
CET master race reporting in. The only right time.
CONSUME CONSUME CONSUME
By that token, you probably shouldn’t get a 3d printer.
Surely this is a more profitable product to sell than to recycle the bottle into plastic pellets?
Why would anybody buy it if the overall quality is questionable.
If I’m paying for something I want it to achieve certain quality targets. Pretty good chance with this that the output will be somewhat variable and that variability will increase the larger the printed item is. If you do this yourself you can judge the quality and fit for purpose, but unless you have actual quality metrics you can report, why would anyone trust it?
What you said is true. Although it is also true that there are likely other people who care more about the cost, or availability or some other factor than quality.
Nowhere is this phenomenon more clear than the fact that these days many unauthorised, unregistered cloud kitchens running out of people’s kitchens are getting quite popular. A rational man, caring about cleanliness, and sanitation standards would never order from these places. Another type of consumer though, driven by hunger, low price would.
Have you run the numbers on the actual demand for PET 3d printer filament
” In countries where PET bottles do not get slapped with an additional fee that induces you to return it for recycling and said fee back”
Slapped?
Just recycle the PET bottles and aluminum cans?
What is wrong with you?
It´s a matter of many countries lacking education at home and schools. Many people will not help in recycling if they are not being forced ( by the taxes ) to do so. They prefer to litter around the streets, then complain that the streets are dirty.
Well there is the middle ground of properly throwing it in a trash bin.
Tell that to India
The worrisome waste there isn’t discarded water bottles.
The list of rivers that contribute the most plastic waste to the oceans suggests otherwise.
I’m not really interested in levying criticism on a specific country, however… I just think it’s cheap to have this “What is wrong with you?!” fit of moralizing ecstasy over people who probably do recycle more regularly than most places on the planet. Seems too easy.
Define “recycle”?
Locally (with separate wheelie bins for sorting general, green, and recycling waste) since China stopped importing our ‘recycling’ waste to burn all of ours goes into landfill.
As a kid the catchphrase was “reduce, reuse, recycle” and presented in reducing order of effectiveness. This guy actually appears to be doing the last action and you want him to stop?
It’s not like they’re forcing you to return the bottles. In fact, most states that have bottle deposits are charging $0.10 USD. So even if it takes 50 2 liter bottles to make a kg, that’s only $5.00 for the materials, which is much less than 1 kg of PETG filament costs. So they’re actually selling the bottles to us below cost.
Here in the Netherlands, they introduced a return fee on aluminium cans a few years ago. You could find plenty of them littering the streets and parks before, and now they’re basically gone. It’s a sad state of affairs but the fees work.
It’s a “sad state of affairs” that the litter is “basically gone”?
Pretty complicated and labor intensive process. On a commercial scale, you’d buy a plastic grinder (common in plastic manufacturing shops) to make pellets. Then mix all the pellets to get them more homoginized, then re-extrude them with an extruder (not an cheap piece of equipment).
Of course, you still have to worry about cross-contamination from everything from paper labels to organic trash. Recycling is a pain.
My mother compulsively peels every label and washes every can and sorts things with German precision (recycling, of course, being an esoteric German religious rite). She makes sure everything is just perfect. She does not ever think about the fact that the instant the truck picks up the bin, it’s all mixed in with her neighbor’s recycling up the street, which has a pizza box and a dead possum in it. The recycling center downtown rejects the entire load, burns fuel to ship it all the way across the Pacific ocean, then some people over there throw it into the ocean. Or hopefully it’s only put into the local landfill.
But if you tell these people that recycling doesn’t work the way they think it does, they literally shoot you in the face with an actual gun. Gotta let them have their little sacraments and mysteries.
or just incinerate it for heat and electricity, plastic is great fuel, it is basically oil
They get very angry if you suggest that as well
Most plastics come from ethane/ethelene, a byproduct of purifying natural gas, and nearly free. There is no oil involved. But yeah, hydrogen and carbon. Carbohydrate hydrocarbon potato potato.
You can just buy recycled plastic pellets that are ready to feed into a filament extruder. They are so cheap that it’s not worth trying to process the bottles yourself.
You have to print a whole lot for the cost of an extruder to be worth it though.
There’s also been a few project on here that showcase printers that use the pellets directly and skip filament extrusion altogether
I’m sorry, but when I can get a 1kg roll of PETG delivered in about 2 to 4 hours for $18, not worth the trouble! I don’t drink that much of anything to have that many bottles and I use a glass and the RO system for water.
PET is also worse as a 3D printer filament than PETG is from what I’ve seen. That added glycol really changes things.
I am in the longterm process of setting up my own shredder (small bottles) or Pulltrusion & pelletizer (larger bottles), extruder and printer to reuse the PET-bottles.
However, i am avare this is neither cost- nor really energey-efficient per se… BUT: I have another “dream”: The reason i want to do this is to learn more about the process and the machnical and electrical and electronical challenges and… drumroll … to have a project i can work on and fiddle around with.
Also, in our local sportsclub, we use 0.5L-PET-Bottles for the drinks. We have bags-full of these… constantly.
As we use a certain plastic part a lot and we either buy it at the moment or print it from “new” filament, i wouold like to print these not critical parts from our own waste. The parts get recycled as pet after we used them. So basically instead of throwing them in the recycling directly, we push them thru another round of use before we ship them off… :)
AS i said: Its a project for the projects-sake ;)