Which is basically irrelevant, since you need to dope the recycled plastic with fresh plastic for most applications and no one is doing this at a meaningful scale
And even if we did scale it up, this just means the amount of plastic use will continue to increase. We’d have to find uses for the lower strength and quality plastic even
The niche isn’t “machine to grind plastic into pellets” which already exists. The niche is “machine that sorts a bucket of random plastic waste into different types, so that when you turn them into pellets they’re only made of one type of plastic, not a random assortment which don’t melt at the same temperature and don’t bond well to one another.”
And these machines exist, it’s simply that the cost makes it hardly profitable. Any decrease in oil prices make recycling plastic that much less profitable
At the time of the concept of plastic recycling, most plastics couldn’t be melted down and re-molded. They just burned when heated.
Now though, most plastics used can be ground down to pellets and reused in a mold.
Which is basically irrelevant, since you need to dope the recycled plastic with fresh plastic for most applications and no one is doing this at a meaningful scale
And even if we did scale it up, this just means the amount of plastic use will continue to increase. We’d have to find uses for the lower strength and quality plastic even
They’re quite difficult to sort by type though. For the consumer and the recycling company.
Yeah, it’s a niche for the 3d printing machine ecosystem that I am surprised hasnt been more eagerly filled.
A recycling grinder into filament machine shouldn’t be that difficult to make.
The niche isn’t “machine to grind plastic into pellets” which already exists. The niche is “machine that sorts a bucket of random plastic waste into different types, so that when you turn them into pellets they’re only made of one type of plastic, not a random assortment which don’t melt at the same temperature and don’t bond well to one another.”
And these machines exist, it’s simply that the cost makes it hardly profitable. Any decrease in oil prices make recycling plastic that much less profitable
Inhalation issues maybe?
You can turn PET bottles into a string and use it in your 3d printer.