PLA - 3D Printing's Biggest Lie.

I live in Australia and I just throw the leftover PLA in the recycling bin. Honestly I couldn't tell you what they do with it

Is there another community that can make use of thermoplastic scraps? I'm thinking people could start a side buisness where printers can drop off their scraps and get paid per kg, it gets processed into beads or bars and resold for profit.

the problem is any option available to tackle this issue is ludicrously expensive or unreliable for instance look up how much a plastic crusher cost or a filament maker.

people in this world have yet to understand, or care that cost limits success and exclusivity limits progress
if it cost too much no one buys it and if you gate keep to manufacturers then the only purpose it will ever see is within that environment under those conditions and the price sky rockets for regular consumers

and i dont care if my plastics are not being used, im not giving free shit to other people to profit on i would rather burn it to ash in my yard and screw up the breathing air for everyone than to give free shit to rich corporation's or help other people who wouldn't pee on me if i was on fire IE. recycling centers and the manufacturer they distribute too .

if recycling was important enough and a planet killer and our lives where in so much danger at this very moment, then these companies' and government alike would have no problem paying me for my recyclables at a decent rate. instead we pay extra a month to receive a green bin to put by the road so you pay to give away and if you take metal to a scrap yard you get pennies for raw materials they turn around and sell for millions. IMO public recycling centers and charities are more often scams than they are honest sure some are good but most if you dig deep enough are not

i get tired of other people getting rich off me while everyone around me incentivizes it and promotes a bad economic belief, FYI being scammed out of your potential wealth by hyper rich corporation is not cool nor is it charitable, there's nothing wrong recycling it is a great and wonderful concept but the fact that big corp. have gate kept its wealth and promoted it as a charitable concept infuriates me its the same with Goodwill or Salvation Army's you give them free shit they profit on it so much so they are capable of franchising out around the entire planet. and if you believe their non profit your nieve

3d printing waste takes up like 0.001% of all plastic waste. We need to solve packaging and unneeded extra plastics that maje our lives "more comfortable".
Packaging and comfort plastic takes up roughly 60% of all plastic waste. We need a solution for that.

Since PLA is actually meltable and reformable, unlike a lot of commercial plastics, what about some home device that returns it to filament shape?

I thought celluloid was extremely flammable.

A lot could be gained if we all asked ourselves questions like: Am I likely to actually use this (purchase, 3D print, whatever) 5 or 10 years from now? If the answer, for any reason, is NO, then why bother in the first place? Probably 95% of all home 3D printing wouldn't be happening at all if such a criterion was the paramount consideration – which it probably should be.

Sadly, the feasability (or simply dazzle factor) of anything seems to prevail over longevity / actual necessity of things for most humans. In that regard, it's hard to argue that we have made much progress with fancy tech at all.

Given proper care, grandpa's woodworking tools are still perfectly usable today. And if he wasn't a slouch at woodworking, probably much of his furniture too. How about your 3D printer or prints? They might actually look rather shitty in comparison regarding their longevity.

This environmental aspect has caused me to hold off on 3D printing altogether so far, and I am unsure whether to get into it at all.

The solution is.. Recycling. 🤷 They don't need to biodegrade if you don't throw it away.

There are too many of us on this planet.

Looks like I have a new use for my fire pit. Turn it into pure carbon , then dispose of safely

hmmm I think the first step is to find a way to reliably, like 97%+ determine the substance. PLA, PETG, ASA, ABS, etc. From there, you need to have a firm that can reliably recycle the material, and pay for the garbage. That'kll be the trick. I am not sold on the CA that you mentioned here, I just dont think it will work. We need to find way to make recycling profitable, that will be the key. The second it is profitable, is the second that it becomes a multi billion dollar industry.

Cringe video. Lol

Huh, cellulose acetate. Isn't that the stuff that cigarette butts are made of?

If it (whatever the "it" at hand actually is) needs to last, then no, biodegradable is just another scam for "planned obsolescence". The planet will be just fine. It's humans that need some help. People first.

Very good and important video, still today.
In Germany, we have a startup-company who collect and recycle PLA (and since a few weeks also PETG), selling the material on their store. That's definitely better for me and my pile of test-prints that can now go and come back to me in a fresh spool.

Calling sunglasses 'sunnies' is the most Australian word I have ever heard. "I rocked up to the sunnie store and coped a bonzer pair!"

3d printers are bad in general though, normalizing plastic waste even more.

I suggest you get to the point first, then explain it in detail. I'm already lost on "why am I even watching this video?", while in actualiy at the beginning, I was interested to learn more about the topic and the video.

Thank you for the information and links. :)

Ok, and what harm does microplastic, other than just being there?

That's why I recycle all my plastics into new filament. Thank you for this video 😉

can i then make AQUARIUM DECORATIONS out of PLA.. if i need a protective safe sealer , can you recommend anything AQUARIUM SAFE.

Dont print disposable shit, problem solved

For your celulose acetate try out optician supliers
We opticians use it still in our apprenticeship to make glasses from scratch

What can be done on the software side to reduce filament use? Composting is great, but the best is to not use the filament in the first place. Do we really need 0.8mm walls? I never see anyone print with single walls. Everyone talks about sanding, but maybe filling is better than sanding(Titebond 3 is great!). With new infill patterns that seem to support the shell better, maybe we need less shell.

How could we help people best choose the settings to reduce plastic use? Could there be a contest on printables for low-plastic stuff? Can designers make more use of internal voids in places that don't need infill?

How about paper-reinforced prints, or using paper inserts to replace some of the walls? some things could replace the whole bottom shell with a piece of card stock.


Maybe we need some way for models to tell the slicer how they will be used, so it can reduce the strength of non load bearing parts?


A lot of prints are test and failed prints. How can we make that no longer a thing? What if we put the extruder on a load cell and measure exactly how much pressure we are extruding with, so we can smoosh the layers together with exactly the right amount of force? Can we reduce clogging at all just by using more pressure? Why do we get spaghetti, instead of promoted to clear a jam and continue the print where we left off? What if instead of a heated bed, we had a laser that preheats the point we are about to print onto? The same laser might even be able to do some smoothing!


Ultimately I think they just need something like plasma gassification so they can recycle arbitrary trash, but I'd love to print with truly sustainable filament.

You might use wasted plastic for roofing shingles,not a cure but maybe better than the landfill.

If it's completely NON toxic why does it matter if it decomposes or not... Especially if people are making the tiny effort to drop waste at a recycling facility..

Thank you for getting the message out that we need to have true recycling, i.e. a way to reduce plastic into it's constituent materials rather than burying or letting it "degrade". All degraded plastic becomes is smaller bits of plastic. The plastic never breaks down, it just gets smaller. You might find a small piece laying on the ground, but that's not the end. It keeps breaking down to mm scale bits, and then into micrometer bits then to ???? They have found mm and smaller bits of plastic on top of some of the highest mountains in the US, in the deserts of the US Southwest where pretty much only researchers and native flora and fauna roam. It is carried on the winds like any other dust, in fact it is part of the dust that gets blown around by the wind. So yes, we need to find a way to break it down into it's constituent materials so those can be reused for making other things, or to make new virgin plastic .... i.e. true recycling. No need to acquire new materials to make virgin plastic just use the recovered materials.

FYI @ Angus, some of your fellow countrymen have developed a method to break down all petroleum based plastics back into oil that can be reused for anything that oil is used for. In this case hopefully to make new virgin plastic so the oil doesn't have to be pumped out of the ground. They built a demonstration plant in the UK. I hope they can scale it up and build them in a lot of countries. I also hope they can create a similar system for breaking down and recycling the PLA.

What I would want to know is what is in the plasticizers are used since they could make the cellulose less biodegradable. Making a filament from existing cellulose is not necessarily recycling it. It could possibly end up in the landfill and not biodegrade and even if it did biodegrade there is no guarantee that there won't be any chemical contamination. Dissolving in acetone may not actually make a difference because when the acetone evaporates you are left with the cellulose compound and acetone vapor in the air. Ideally when creating a new plastic compound we need to also make sure there is a way to truly recycle it and not rely on finding a way at a later date.

Interesting to see that this video has only 5% likes - I'm all for looking after our environment, but it just shows that many of us are really not as taken in by the whole "climate crisis" or "environmental emergency" nonsense as the media would have you believe.

So, does this mean that I should stop feeding my PLA scraps to my dog?

I used PLA. Wastage worries me. I don't bin my waste. I save it up and melt it into moulds.

We should all try to reduce our damage done sure, but it would be nice to see the producers etc be right there trying too, use some of those profits to clean up the mess they created in the beginning.

Ocean pollution was mentioned...
There is a huge cause behind all types/levels of plastics in the ocean and it beats what gets washed out from land (not saying it isn't an issue but it's not THE issue like we keep getting fed), not many seem willing to want to mention it.
Commercial fishing is destroying the sea beds as well as dumping tonnes of plastic waste from nets, lines etc.

Anyone that likes to see a different side of an equation, go watch 'Seaspiracy' for an idea.
Do your own research folks, watch and read all you can to try and see past the smoke and mirrors.

About corn. In the USA we grow approximately 100 million acres of corn. Of that less than two million are for humans the rest is for industry. You cannot eat the corn grown for industry which is animal feed and chemicals. People do not need more corn to eat as it’s already in everything we eat anyway in one form or another. Rethink the food or industry issue.

I didn't know this had to be said...

Oil well go brrrr

Technically... petroleum is renewable....it just takes a really long time.

I have Eco Pla IS that any better?

You posted this video over a year ago and I remember watching it a while ago. Have you found any biogradable alternatives Angus? I must say as a stop gap I like the idea of recycling PLA into new filament, there are quite a few people doing this.

How did you think the trash you threw in the trash wouldn't end up as trash?

23 075th like lol

Cellulose acetate is extremely flammable. All types of cellulosic plastics are extremely flammable. What’s next, you’re going to bring up Bakelite aren’t you?

A question…….where does petroleum come from if not nature? So far, all of the predictions of when we will “run out of oil” have been wrong. Just wondering, if something is found in nature and was not created by man, isn’t it natural? Crude oil and sugar cane are both natural materials. Whether the raw materials were natural is irrelevant. PLA and crude oil derived plastics are still plastic. They are the same material, created in different ways with the same issues. There are bacteria and molds in nature that can break down crude oil, just like corn is broken down by molds and bacteria. Problem is that neither milk jugs nor PLA are affected in any way by those same molds and bacteria.

Great work, thank you for the video. I just want to add, that around 75% of the plastic waste in the ocean came from fishing nets and ropes. So if you are really concerned about plastic in the ocean, the most helpful and inmate action that we can take is stop eating fish.

I’m with you on the need for changes… but there’s a huge reason the film industry abandoned celluloid film base: fire!

Great video. The thing we have to remember is most plastics can't be recycled. Thus they end up in landfills or just degrading in nature somewhere. So while we'd like an infrastructure set up, there isn't one, and won't be one. Because they already have this problem going on and it's never been addressed. I take no joy in having to even share this sad truth.

He is so happy to talk about how the ocean is full of microplastic. Real 3d printing enthusiast.

what about poly terra that claims to be a lot for biodegradeable?

if we can have a way to melt these plastics and we can roll it out like a brand new filament at home it would be very helpful