One of the less celebrated features of 3D printing is that it produces a fair amount of plastic waste. I’ve tried to hang onto all the “pure” waste I’ve produced where it consists of a single filament and I’ve built up quite a collection over the last couple of years. There are the little “poops” of filament produced when the printer clears the nozzle when preparing to print, the flow test lines and the prototype pieces. On top of that you have the prints that failed in use or never really got the usage they were intended for.

Unfortunately it isn’t straightforward to melt it down and turn it back into printable filament. To a certain extent that can be done but you need space and a significant investment in hardware and time. If you can’t produce a high quality finished product, you are also likely to end up with more failed prints and thus more waste to deal with.

Another approach is to melt it down and mould it into some other form. However, that also needs more equipment. It would be ill advised to use a device that is intended for food (like the oven) and I don’t have a spare portable oven. Furthermore, I’d have to think what sort of things I wanted to create. For example, I could make coasters but how many do I need?

I’m getting to the point when I need to do something so I think my answer is going to be ballast. I’ve got a bookshelf I built a decade ago and one of the weaknesses of the design is that there are voids at the ends of the shelf where books can get sucked in and lost. I never got round to filling them with wood because of the effort of finding and shaping suitable sized scraps. However, if I could print a series of containers and give them some heft not by printing more plastic but filling them with the scraps from past projects, that would be useful and might at least provide me with a longer term home for what I’ve amassed so far and the next couple of years.

I’ve got the container designed; time to start printing a few and see how they work out in practice.