Saving The Planet With Carefully Cut Paper

December 22, 2023 by Kristina Panos 28 Comments

You may not think much of origami or its cousin-with-cutouts kirigami, but the latter could (and already is) helping to save the planet. But let’s back up a bit.

Most readers will be familiar with origami, the Japanese art of folding paper. But there is also kirigami, which uses a series of cuts to produce 3D shapes from 2D stock. Turns out that if you cut paper just right, you can turn it into highly-recyclable packaging that even interlocks with itself, negating the need for folding or even tape.

The video after the break takes a look at 3M’s Scotch Cushion Lock™ protective wrap through the eyes of its inventor, Tom Corrigan. It all started when 3M wanted to create a self-assembling box from a flat piece of cardboard.

So far, that particular invention hasn’t come to fruition, but after many long nights with paper and X-Acto knives, Tom came up with a honeycomb design with strong vertical walls that absorb energy much like bubble wrap or packing peanuts. The toothiness of each honeycomb wall adds height which adds strength, and allows the packaging to interlock with itself.

Not only is this packaging easier to recycle, it takes up way less space than other packaging alternatives. Once expanded, a 1,000 square foot roll of this stuff is equal to 2,500 square feet of bubble wrap, which constitutes about a dozen rolls.

Now, what to do about all that expanded polystyrene packaging still out there? With the right tool, you can turn it into insulation.

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Recycling Batteries With Bacteria

December 18, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 6 Comments

Vehicle battery recycling is going to be a big deal with all the electric cars hitting the roads. What if you could do it more effectively with the power of microbes? (via Electrek)

“Li-ion” vehicle batteries can be any of a number of different chemistries, with more complex cathode makeups, like NCM (LiNi_xMn_yCo_1-x-yO₂), being understandably more complex to separate into their original constituents. Researchers and companies in the industry are hoping to find economically-viable ways to get these metals back for both the environmental and economic benefits a closed loop system could provide.

Researchers in the UK developed a method using two species of bacteria to precipitate Ni, Mn, and Co from the liquid leached from cathodes. Li remained in the liquid where it could be processed separately like that obtained in Li brine. Mn was precipitated first by S. oneidensis MR-1, and a following step removed Ni and Co with D. alaskensis G20. The researchers report that Ni and Co show promise for further separation via biological methods, but more research is required for this step.

If you’re looking for some more interesting ways bacteria can be harnessed for the energy system, checkout this microbial fuel cell, another using soil, and an enzyme derived from bacteria that can pull electricity from thin air.

What Can You Do With Thousands Of Vintage Telephones?

November 20, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 56 Comments

Telephones. We’ve got a few around the place, and some may remember all the weird and wonderful varieties produced over the years. But, vintage phone dealers [Ron and Mary Knappen] may have a few too many. With a large 41,000 sqft property, at least three farm buildings, and no fewer than 33 semi-trailers loaded to busting with racks of phones, the retiring couple have a job sorting it all out and finding someone passionate enough to take over this once-strong business.

Technology has moved on somewhat since 1971 when they got into the retro business, and there are only so many period dramas being produced that could make a dent in a collection of a thousand steel desk phones. Nobody seems interested in taking on their business, so they are concentrating on emptying that large property in order to sell it, but the fate of the crazy number of other storage locations seems uncertain. Perhaps, other than a few museums around the world purchasing a few, this collection really is likely heading to the recyclers.

So what can we do with a vintage phone in this modern era? Here’s a primer to get you started. How about going cellular? Or maybe just add them to your existing designer collection?

Thanks to [Jeremy] and Adafruit for the tip!

Hack A Soda Can Into Jewelry

November 9, 2023 by Al Williams 11 Comments

If you’ve ever needed some aluminum for a project, you might have noticed you have easy access to aluminum cans. If you need a cylinder, fine. But what if you don’t? [ThescientistformerlyknownasNaegeli] shows how to create an attractive necklace from two soda cans, and we think the techniques might be usable for other cases where you might need aluminum. If you care more about the necklace, it looks good. You only have to add a 3D-printed clasp or, if you prefer, you can buy a clasp and use that. For the Hackaday crowd, you can also use the resulting structure as an aluminum cable shield, which might better suit you.

The post gives more details and points to other posts for even deeper dives into many of the steps. But the basic idea is you strip the ink from the outside of the can and then cut the can into a strip. The mechanism for that looks a lot like a machine to cut plastic bottles into strips, but that method isn’t feasible without special blades.

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Reducing Poop On Multicolor Prints

November 5, 2023 by Bob Baddeley 25 Comments

While multicolor printing eliminates painting steps and produces vibrant objects, there are two significant downsides; filament consumption and print time. A single-nozzle filament printer needs to switch from one color to another, and doing so involves switching to the other filament and then purging the transition filament that contains a mixture of both colors, before resuming the print with the clean new color.

[teachingtech] tests out a variety of methods for reducing print time and waste. One surprising result was that purging into the infill didn’t result in significant savings, even when the infill was as high as 50%. Things that did have a positive effect included reducing the amount of purge per transition based on light to dark color changes, and printing multiple copies at once so that even though the total amount of waste was the same as a single part, the waste per part was reduced.

All of the tests were with the same model, which had 229 color changes within a small part, so your mileage may vary, but it’s an interesting investigation into some of the deeper settings within the slicer. Reducing filament waste and print time is an admirable goal, and if you make your own extruder, you can turn all of that purge waste into various shades of greenish brownish filament. Continue reading “Reducing Poop On Multicolor Prints” →

Lessons In Printer Poop Recycling

November 4, 2023 by Dan Maloney 33 Comments

The fundamental problem with multi-color 3D printing using a single hotend is that they poop an awful lot. Every time they change filaments, they’ve got to purge the single nozzle, which results in a huge number of technicolor “purge poops” which on some machines are even ejected out a chute at the back of the printer. The jokes practically write themselves.

What’s not a joke, though, is the sheer mass of plastic waste this can produce. [Stefan] from CNC Kitchen managed to generate over a kilo of printer poop for a 500-gram multi-color print. So he set about looking for ways to turn printer poops back into filament, with interesting results. The tests are based around a commercial lab-scale filament extruder, a 3Devo Composer, but should apply to almost any filament extruder, even the homebrew ones. A few process tips quickly became evident. First, purge poops are too big and stringy (ick) to feed directly into a filament extruder, so shredding was necessary.

Second, everything needs to be very clean — no cross-contamination with plastics other than PLA, no metal bits in the chopped-up plastic bits, and most importantly, no water contamination. [Stefan]’s first batch of recycled filament came from purge poops that had been sitting around a while, and sucked a lot of water vapor from the air. A treatment in a heated vacuum chamber seems to help, but what worked best was using purge poops hot and fresh from a print run. Again, ick.

[Stefan] eventually got a process down that produced decent, usable filament that would jam the printer or result in poor print quality. It even had a pretty nice color, which of course is totally dependent on the mix of colors you start with. Granted, not everyone has access to a fancy filament extruder like his, so this may not be practical for everyone, but it at least shows that there’s a path to reducing the waste stream from any printer, especially multi-material ones.

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Getting Shredded Plastic…and Legs

September 23, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 10 Comments

While electric motors have taken the drudgery out of many tasks, human power has its advantages. [Precious Plastic Torino] has developed a human-powered plastic shredder for those times when an electric motor just won’t do.

Designed primarily for educational purposes at venues where electricity can be difficult to source, but also useful for off-grid environments, this exercise bike-based shredder can take small pieces of plastic and shred them into tiny pieces suitable for use with any of the other machines in the Precious Plastics ecosystem like their injection molding machine. As with all [Precious Plastics] projects, the files ~~are~~ will be open source; however, there is a six month exclusivity period for Patreon subscribers to help fund development efforts.

The build is relatively simple: take an old exercise bike, remove the unnecessary bits, and run the chain up to drive a shredding mechanism mounted on the front of the bike. We think they should’ve kept the flywheel to help keep the momentum going while shredding but can’t fault them for wanting to keep the prototype as simple as possible. Maybe the next step is getting these in spin classes around the country so people can get their exercise and help recycle in their community at the same time!

If this shredder doesn’t suit your fancy, maybe recycle your plastic with SHREDII or this other DIY effort. If you’d rather generate electricity on your exercise bike, then try building this bike generator.

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