PLA - 3D Printing's Biggest Lie.

let's talk about this 3d printing is an incredible technology and it's become so accessible now that literally anyone can take advantage of it you can pick up one of these bad boys for under 200 bucks and use it to create real world physical objects using digital blueprints of almost anything on demand in the comfort of your own home and the most popular plastic to use by far is pla pla or polylactic acid is a bioplastic which means it's produced using renewable resources such as corn or sugar cane unlike petroleum-derived plastics which rely on finite resources for their production in a world becoming ever fixated on renewables in every sector pla has rapidly skyrocketed in production and demand in recent years and the thing is it's easy to 3d print with as well before pla filament was widely available the plastic most often used on these machines was abs a petroleum-based thermoplastic and not only is its production and disposal not great for the environment but it's a pretty crappy plastic to 3d print with too it shrinks it warps delaminates unless you have a high temperature printing environment on the other hand pla is easy to print it's very dimensionally accurate and it doesn't even need a heated print bed and for years i was pretty convinced that pla prints were the way forward for 3d printing and weren't damaging to the environment and would biodegrade quickly once disposed of unfortunately that's just not true and in the spirit of team seats i wanted to address some of my concerns and propose a solution to the growing plastic problem that is 3d printing i'm not a materials scientist but i'll do my best and i encourage your comments down below you see all plastics can degrade but only some plastics can biodegrade and very few plastics are compostable plastics that degrade are just flat out terrible for the environment you might have heard of the term microplastics being thrown around a lot these days they're created when plastics break into smaller and smaller pieces through mechanical processes or turn to dust through exposure to uv radiation and these particles find their way into our waterways and eventually into the ocean what you're left with is this soup of microscopic plastic fragments the ocean is now full of micro plastics and they bio accumulate in the creatures up the food chain and that includes us we now eat plastic delicious biodegrading is better biodegradable plastics can be broken down into their core building blocks water carbon dioxide and biomass that can be reused by other organisms but only under the right conditions pla can biodegrade absolutely but to do so requires months of exposure to temperatures over 50 degrees celsius in a specific environment only seen in industrial composting facilities you can't break it down in your garden compost bin it's not going to happen in fact the conditions are so specific and the enzyme required so rare in nature that i've now started to see pla referred to as simply just a degradable plastic because outside of these conditions it simply won't break down this only applies to virgin pla all the pla filaments now on the market for 3d printing have modifiers added to them to improve their toughness or temperature resistance or flexibility or even just for their appearances these modifiers could be anything they could be polymers or additives and it's highly unlikely that they will also biodegrade under the same conditions that pla requires and look for some prints you want them to last as long as possible that's fine but what about all those benchy boats test models and decorative prints that we make do you really need them to last potentially hundreds of years i print so many things for reviews and for my iterator design process and i just really hate knowing that they'll probably end up in landfill or even worse washed out to sea hobby hoarder did a really interesting experiment a few years ago where he printed pla benches not unlike this one left them exposed to the elements buried and submerged in water for two years to study the differences in degradation and there was none when i saw that video it was honestly pretty eye opening so what solutions are there just stop printing stuff sorry it's not really going to happen i personally believe there are only two realistic ways forward if fdm fff 3d printing is to become more environmentally conscious number one recycling you can recycle plastic at home fairly easily for example just collect your failed or unwanted 3d prints and support material and then melt them down into something else useful for my testing i collected and then melted down a range of pla test prints in a cheap electric oven to create this plastic sheet and you can now reuse this material to create and make new things brothers make have produced a number of videos on how they convert plastic waste into a huge range of products which gives the material a second lease on life and i do think it's really cool you should definitely go check out their work however my biggest issue with this approach is that's essentially a hobby in itself if you're interested in 3d printing it's pretty time-consuming as it is it's not really all that realistic in my opinion and even so you'll eventually end up with too much plastic waste to use or too many recycled trinkets it's not properly cradle to cradle design but more like landfill with extra steps instead for the recycling angle to actually make a difference i reckon that government and industry leaders need to get together and actually invest in infrastructure to properly process pla and make that process accessible to the public whether it's through construction of industrial composting plants or by taking in pla plastic waste and turning it back into pellets for industry use that would be a pretty good step in the right direction some companies in other countries already create 3d printing filament using recycled materials i've tested many on the channel before so it can be done however i have absolutely zero faith in the australian government doing anything useful we literally used to send boats of our recyclables to china until they just didn't want it anymore and i'm pretty sure all of it just goes straight into landfill now ranch trent australia sucks no instead i reckon we need to create a new standard for everyday 3d printing with a filament that properly breaks down when exposed to the elements especially if it finds its way into our waterways when i'm done with my test prints i want to be able to throw them into my compost heap to be broken down naturally and safely and the thing is that plastic already exists and has done for over 150 years and it's made using the most abundantly naturally occurring polymer in the world cellulose cellulose acetate was first discovered in 1865 and up until fairly recently was incredibly common for use in packaging apparel film as well as sunglasses the frames on sunnies in fact it's probably the only plastic to have actually saved turtles replacing the use of real tortoise shell from poached hawksbill turtles and probably saving them from extinction the practice was finally banned worldwide in 1973 and the thing about cellulose acetate is that unlike many other plastics today it can biodegrade in soil and sea water turning back into cellulose and acetic acid within at most a couple of years and much much faster in composting environments i'll link to some articles in the description below if you want to read out more there's heaps of wordy stuff to get through but it's really really interesting as it turns out though it's actually really difficult to get the damn stuff these days at least in australia in the past cellophane was indeed made from cellulose and you can test it because it um it readily dissolves in acetone this stuff though it says cellophane but it's a fraud i put someone acetone and nothing happened the acetone did strip the red off this sheet leaving it just clear but my best guess is that these are both polypropylene which decomposes far more slowly pretty annoyed by that actually in fact this white powder was the only form of cellulose acetate i could get my hands on quickly acetate sheets probably could have worked too that nothing was around locally and i do wonder if they're even real anymore as well but this stuff is meant to be used as an exfoliant additives for soaps as an alternative to plastic beads which are already really terrible but it's plenty good enough for my experiments first i wanted to see if i could dissolve it into acetone and make plastic with it and it does readily dissolve you end up with a thick goop which i spread out on a number of services to dry i found some interesting papers discussing using extruded acetone cellulose acetate mixture uh and i actually reckon it's pretty viable the thin films left behind are actually incredibly clear and pretty strong too which is really neat but if i'm going to make it into a filament to extrude it needs to melt initially i tried to cook some with a hot air gun using a tiny diy frying pan um it wasn't very effective so i put some of the powder into my oven um and according to the internet cellulose acetate has a melting point of 230 to 300 degrees c which is quite a bit higher than pla but as i slowly approached 230 degrees c which is the max of my oven it started to look and smell burnt and almost caramelized and it was super sticky so i pulled it out to cool what's wild is after it cooled and i tried to pry it free it squeaked in that distinctive cellophane sound i haven't heard that since i was a kid so that caught me off guard sadly that's like the only cool thing to result from this experiment the brown chunks are incredibly brittle it didn't even melt too too much it's not even remotely viable to what i would consider being able to be extruded into filament but i know it's possible because of this make a coin this is 3d printed with a cellulose-based 3d printing filament it also smells like chocolate no really in 2017 i did a video on a kickstarter for scented 3d printing filament dan's smelly plastic sadly it didn't get off the ground but i think the most important aspect of the campaign was completely overlooked it wasn't just another pla with additives but instead made using recycled cellulose also i think i deserve a like for managing to find a single maker coin that i printed almost four years ago it definitely is showing some age it still smells quite strongly of that chemically chocolate smell um but it is starting to sort of split across the layer lines but at the time it printed really really well same as pla totally totally fine and i broke a little bit off and put in some acetone to see if it did dissolve and indeed it does whereas pla usually will swell and maybe get sticky but it doesn't usually completely dissolve beyond this i also found an italian blog post talking about 3d printing with cellulose acetate filament with very little information but beyond those and a handful of difficult to decipher scientific journals there isn't really much out there and i want to change that now there is a catch or rather a few catches cellulose acetate is chemically intensive to make and to make the resulting plastic usable you need to add a plasticizer which improves strength and flexibility as well as improving the melting characteristics and well not all of them are very good for the environment i am no material scientist again but hopeful a balance exists between the material properties and environmental impact also it's a plastic made from trees so that's not fantastic because i like trees but recycled sources are totally viable and honestly it sits better with me than pla which is essentially made from food people could like eat that corn instead of it being used to make plastic and ethanol sustainability is challenging and i'm going to keep working at this problem but in the meantime we can work together to fix a very real immediate problem i've partnered up with mr beast and mark rober along with hundreds of other creators on team seas to make a dent on plastic waste and you can help ocean conservancy and the ocean cleanup have promised that for every one dollar raised one pound of trash will be removed from the oceans rivers and beaches all around the world together we're trying to raise an insane 30 million dollars which is over 13 000 metric tons of trash bonkers but i reckon the internet as a collective can do it so head over to teamses.org link below if you're able to donate and i'll keep you guys updated with the progress of the campaign as well as my research into a viable alternative to pla moving forwards because remember kids benchies don't belong on the beach thanks for watching guys bye

Channel: Maker's Muse

Views: 718,145

Keywords: 3d, printing

Id: jCsnVp6mEbk

Length: 13min 47sec (827 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 29 2021