The Plastic Waste Flooding Our Oceans Can Fuel 3D Printers

I’m a fan of 3D printing, but not a fan of all the trashy plasticky trinkets most of them are limited to making now. I’ve always thought the only compelling reason for using a 3D printer of the tabletop, plastic filament variety is to make something unique that you otherwise couldn’t. Bespoke sex toys, bespoke parts for your drone, bespoke bits of your face—that kind of thing.

But I’m willing to relax that rule if you’re making trashy trinkets out of actual trash, turning what was literally waste into something that, though perhaps not the most useful thing in the world, holds some value for someone.

That’s the idea behind a project called Plastic Bank, which is using 3D printing in its efforts to help reduce the waste plastic in the oceans. Here’s the idea: You collect litter from the oceans and waterways, then recycle it into plastic filament that can be 3D printed.

Ecopreneurist reports that they recently printed this little plastic wrench with a MakerBot, which they claim is the first thing to be 3D printed from recycled ocean plastic. Sure, it’s not the most amazing thing in the world, but it’s better than having that same plastic strewn across the beaches, or just pumping out more plastic to pollute the world. (Though, if it’s used as an alternative to other manufacturing methods, 3D printing could also save on waste materials owing to the additive nature of the process.)

And as we’ve seen time and again, a lot of plastic ends up in our waterways, making its way all the way down to the depths of the oceans and forming whole floating islands of garbage on the surface, not to mention poisoning the ecosystems they pollute.

But as that’s apparently not enough to get us to clean up, Plastic Bank is basically trying to incentivise collecting waste plastic by giving it some new value. They’re looking to set up the scheme in communities faced with poverty, for example in Colombia and Peru, where the first “bank” was launched last month.

To be clear, I don’t quite agree with the company’s assertion that they’re “part of the solution to eradicate poverty and eliminate plastic waste from our oceans”—it’s going to take a little more than that to achieve either of these goals—but recycling any amount of waste plastic can only be a good thing. They recently won an award for their efforts from Recycling Council of British Columbia in Canada, where they’re based (and where they collected the filament for that recycled wrench).

If nothing else, at least it might encourage people to consider sustainability in everyday hobbyist 3D printing. If we can turn even washed up plastic waste into 3D printing materials, surely its about time recycled filament became a standard?