ERRF 22: Recreator 3D Turns Trash Into Filament

October 21, 2022 by Tom Nardi 30 Comments

In Back to the Future, Doc Brown returns to 1985 with a version of his DeLorean time machine that has been modified with technology from the future. After telling Marty they need to go on yet another adventure, Doc recharges the DeLorean’s flux capacitor and time circuits by tossing pieces of garbage into the slick Mr. Fusion unit mounted to the rear of the vehicle. The joke being that, in the future, you could simply head over to the local big box store and pick up a kitchen appliance that’s capable of converting waste matter into energy.

Unfortunately, we’re nowhere near powering our homes with banana peels and beer cans. But if the Recreator 3D is any indication, the technology required to turn plastic bottles rescued from the trash into viable PET filament for your 3D printer is all but upon us. While there are still some aspects of the process that could stand to be streamlined, such as fusing multiple runs of filament together into one continuous roll, the core concepts all seem to be in place.

The MK5Kit Mini is currently in development with LDO Motors.

Creator [Josh Taylor] made the trip out to the 2022 East Coast RepRap Festival to not only show off the Recreator 3D, a project he’s been working on now for over a year, but to get people excited about the idea of turning waste plastic into filament. It’s not necessarily a new concept, and in fact [Josh] says earlier efforts such as the PETBOT are what inspired him to create his own open source take on the “pultrusion” concept.

According to [Josh], actually printing with the recycled filament isn’t that different from using commercial PETG, though it’s recommended you lower your speeds. A nozzle temperature of around 260 °C seems to work best, with the bed at 70 °C. Interestingly, the filament produced by the process is actually hollow inside, so the most critical change to make is increasing your extrusion rate to about 130% of normal to compensate for the internal void.

The current revision of the Recreator 3D, known as the MK5Kit, can be assembled using several core components salvaged from a low-cost Ender 3 printer in addition to a number of parts that the user will need to print themselves. For those who’d rather not source the parts, [Josh] says he hopes to get formal kits put together sometime next year, thanks to a partnership with LDO Motors.

But ultimately, [Josh] says the most important thing to him is that the plastic is recycled instead of getting sent to a landfill or incinerator. So whether you build a Recreator 3D or come up with your own design, all are welcome to the PET Pultruders United Facebook group he’s created to discuss the finer points of turning plastic trash into treasure.

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Dead Solar Panels Are The Hottest New Recyclables

July 19, 2022 by Lewin Day 99 Comments

When it comes to renewable energy, there are many great sources. Whether it’s solar, wind, or something else, though, we need a lot of it. Factories around the globe are rising to the challenge to provide what we need.

We can build plenty of new solar panels, of course, but we need to think about what happens when they reach end of life. As it turns out, with so much solar now out in the field, a major new recycling industry may be just around the corner.

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Weed Eater String Made From Plastic Bottles

July 12, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 29 Comments

For those who don’t mind constantly adding tiny but measurable amounts of microplastics to their landscaping, string trimmers are an excellent way of maintaining edging around garden beds, trimming weeds, or maintaining ground covers on a steep hill. One problem with them, though, is that not only is the string consumable but it can be expensive. Plus, if you have a trimmer with a proprietary spool you need to hope the company never goes out of business. Or, you can simply refill your string spool with this handy tool.

The build uses plastic bottles to create the string from what would likely become garbage anyway. First, a sharp roller-style knife slices the plastic into a long thin strip. Once cut, it is fed through a heater similar to a hot end on a 3D printer which allows the plastic to be deformed or forged into a cylinder. From there the plastic is added onto a spool, which also has the motor in it that drives the entire mechanism. In this case it is using an old variable-speed drill.

From the comments on the video, there is some discussion about the economics of using this string in a weed eater. It’s likely the plastic won’t last as long as specialty string trimmer string, and the time and expense of making the plastic may never save much money. But we have to give credit to the ingenuity nonetheless. And, if you’re really into recycling plastic just for the sake of keeping it out of the landfill, there are plenty of other ways to go about accomplishing that goal.

I will NEVER buy weed whip line again! from landscaping

2022 Hackaday Prize: Reuse, Recycle, Revamp Finalists

June 28, 2022 by Elliot Williams 13 Comments

The 2022 Hackaday Prize is focused on taking care of the planet. The theme of our second challenge round, “Reduce, Recycle, Revamp” is all about tailoring your projects to make use of existing resources and keeping material out of the landfill rather than contributing to it. Our judges have scrutinized the entries and handed me the sealed envelope. All of these ten projects will receive $500 right now and are eligible for the Grand Prize of $50,000, to be announced in November.

We were looking for two broad types of recycling projects in this round, either projects that incorporate a significant recycled component in their build, or projects that facilitate recycling themselves, and frankly we got a good mix of both!
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PVC Pipe Transformed Into Handy Tool Box

June 15, 2022 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

Would you believe the multi-tiered toolbox pictured here started its life as a piece of bog standard PVC pipe? It certainly wouldn’t be our first choice of building material, but as shown in the video after the break, it only takes a heat source and something suitably flat to convert a piece of PVC pipe into a versatile sheet material.

Unrolling the PVC pipe and getting it flat is covered in the first minute of the video, while the rest of the run time is dedicated to building the tool box. Each and every piece you see here, except for the screws and lid hinges, is carefully cut from the PVC sheet. Though we suspect a few more chunks of pipe went into this build than the video would have you believe.

Would we build such an elaborate box if we had to cut each piece of the thing out by hand? Probably not. But then, we can’t deny the final results here are pretty impressive. Incidentally, if you thought those hinges on the top looked a lot like links removed from a watch band…you’d be correct.

Admittedly we’re a bit late covering this one, and under normal circumstances we might have let it slip by given the several million views it’s amassed over the last year. But the central theme of reusing a common material to build something unexpected is solid Hackaday territory, and aligns closely with this year’s Hackaday Prize challenges.

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A fridge magnet with a display showing recycling reminders

Hackaday Prize 2022: BinPal Is A Convenient Recycling Reminder

June 11, 2022 by Robin Kearey 14 Comments

While curbside pickup of recyclables is convenient, it does require you to keep track of which type of waste is picked up when: miss the biweekly paper pickup and you’ll soon find yourself stockpiling four weeks’ worth of boxes and newspapers. When [Dominic Buchstaller]’s stack of cardboard began to reach his ceiling, he decided to take action by building himself BinPal: a fridge magnet that helps you remember when to take out which bin.

At heart of the simple but effective BinPal is an ESP32 board that connects to Google Apps Script and retrieves the pickup schedule from Google Calendar. If one of four categories of waste is due for pickup, its icon is highlighted on an LCD screen. The user can press a touch-sensitive button to confirm the bin has been brought out for pickup; if that hasn’t been done by 8 pm, the display’s backlight starts flashing as an additional reminder.

The outer shell of the device is made from laser-cut plywood, with a few strong magnets glued inside to ensure the BinPal stays firmly attached to the fridge. In the true spirit of recycling, [Dominic] used only components that he had in his parts bin to make the BinPal. However, these parts are all easily available online, and with the full schematics and code available on the project’s Hackaday.io page it should be easy to adapt the design to different hardware platforms as well.

[Dominic]’s design was inspired by a flashing LED chore reminder we featured a few years ago. You can also make household task reminders by reusing a Kindle for its ePaper display.

2022 Hackaday Prize: Reuse, Recycle, And Revamp All The Things

June 7, 2022 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

Where has the year gone? It’s already summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and the second Challenge of the 2022 Hackaday Prize ends this weekend, along with your chance at one of ten $500 prizes. If you thrive on last-minute challenges, consider the eleventh hour upon you. But don’t panic; there’s still a decent amount of time left to start a new project over on Hackaday.io and get it entered into the contest.

The second Challenge focuses on creating new ways of recycling materials. What does this look like? That’s a pretty broad topic, but it could be anything from a better method of chip harvesting to an inexpensive and/or low-energy process for shredding used plastic and forming it into millable blocks.

Don’t just think big on a commercial scale — imagine what people can do at home with the stuff in their recycle bin or their neighbor’s trash. If everyone had access to one of [Jerzeek]’s plastic scanners for identifying the type of plastic that mystery bucket or old watering can was made of, just think what could be done. As long as your project focuses on reusing, recycling, or revamping, we want to see it!

So far, we’ve seen a bunch of excellent projects, many of which are focused on recycling plastic. There’s the Pullstruder, which creates PET filament from plastic bottles, and a method for vacuum-forming HDPE plastic directly from milk jugs. There has to be more than one way to upcycle acrylic scraps into new sheets and jewelry, but the best one definitely involves a panini press and a car jack.

Recycling plastic is totally fantastic, but it’s not the only material available at the dump. You’ll probably have no trouble finding tires from which to make footstools and tables, and if you’re lucky, there’ll be an old phone that could be turned into an IoT assistant. If you want to take the circularity thing literally, dig up a printer and and old CD player and turn them into a mini pottery machine that uses cornstarch.

[jude_pullen] is vacu-forming plastic milk jugs ’til the cows come home.

[Guillermo Perez Guillen]’s cornstarch mini pottery machine spins us right round.

So basically, we have a bunch of awesome entries right now, but we don’t have yours! Remember: it doesn’t have to be a new project, just a new project page. Did you revolutionize recycling during lockdown? Make a new project and tell us about it! Just don’t forget to actually enter the thing by using the drop-down on the left before 7AM PDT on Sunday, June 12th. Need a time converting countdown thingy? We’ve got you.

After the recycle bin is empty, we’ll be moving on immediately to the Hack It Back challenge. This time, we’ll be asking you to teach old tech new tricks, or to bring a piece of gear back from the dead. Turn a blender into a Dremel-like tool, or give an old ‘scope a screen upgrade. You know what to do!