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Plastic to Prints - the Science
Plastic to Prints - the Science
HOW STRONG is PET Bottle Filament?
PET bottles are something I’m sure all of us have at our homes. But did you know that you can quite simply recycle one of these bottles into usable filament without the need for complicated and expensive shredders and extrusion systems? Pull-trusion is a method that I’ve been hearing more and more about of over the last year. Pultrusion means that you take a PET bottle, slice it into a long strip using a simple fixture with a razor blade, and then just pull this tape through a slightly modified 3D printer hotend and get ready to use filament out of it!
Pull-trusion simplifies this process quite a bit because you just pull a piece of PET tape through a cheap 3D printer nozzle and get filament out of it. An average PET bottle has around 20g of usable material, so it’s not a ton of filament that you’re getting. The interesting part here is that the nozzle is only heated to around 200°C, which is below the material’s melting point to just make it soft. The nozzle then simply folds the soft material leaving you with a really interestingly shaped strand of plastic. The nozzles are usually drilled to 1.6 mm, but due to the slight deformations after the shaping process, the outer dimensions are within a range of 1.6 to 1.9
Plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) are a good example of well-defined post-consumer plastic waste streams that are suitable for high-quality mechanical recycling [14]. The recycling schemes and processes for PET bottles have evolved to very high standards that allow for post-consumer recyclates to be reintroduced into new food contact applications [15]. Year by year, humans produce several hundred billion plastic bottles [16]. As long as appropriate collection schemes are in place, these bottles can be closed-loop recycled into new bottles (bottle-to-bottle) [15]. Besides that, bottles may be open-loop recycled into the textile industry (bottle-to-fiber) [17] or into thermoforming sheet products (bottle-to-sheet)
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