What do you guy do with all of plastic scrap leftover from 3D printing?

What do you guy do with all of plastic scrap leftover from 3D printing?
Do you put all kind of plastics in one bag/box waiting to go to recycle bin or you seperated every type of material?
Or you just keep it for later use? (ABS juice, homemade filament, etc)

It looks like most people save it for later use (at least at the time of posting this) but I’m not sure for what. Creating homemade filament is very expensive to get started and the learning curve is almost as steep as learning 3D printing, more than most printers for a decent setup, and then the filament isn’t even that great. You have to shred the plastic down to pellet size and make sure it’s completely clean and is free of contaminants like dust. It’s usually just better to buy filament. It’s really only ever worth it to make your own filament if you perfect the process then only print with recycled plastic or plastic pellets. There were a few places in the UK that allow you to recycle scrap into new filament but I can’t seem to find any sources anymore, I could only find info about Stratasys recycling their metal cartridges.

This vote needs a “throw it away” option. Almost nobody actually recycles filament. Adam’s point about making new filament is spot-on. And the regular municipal recycling system will sort out and throw away or incinerate anything they get that is ambiguous material. You don’t want to contaminate the recycled material streams too much. Mixed plastic is practically worthless. And every filament out there is heavily blended with additives and melt modifiers to make it printable. It’s just not a realistic thing to recycle.

Down-cycling uses like ABS slurry are about the best thing you can do. I keep a lot of my more interesting failed prints as demo pieces to show people how 3D printing works. But the majority of scrap goes in the trash.

Recycled and sell for money in China

My town doesn’t even ask us to sort paper separate paper from plastic but they do accept #7 plastics (uncategorized recyclable plastics) so I feel like they can just toss it with that if they choose.

Throw it in the garbage. We also test print for 24 hours when building printers, so all of those either get binned or given away at events. I’ve got like 20 plunderbuss pete on a shelf… http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:144775

Recyclebag all in one. Bcuz in germany it gets sorted out.

it’s not marked with any kind of recycling label so I figure it’ll end up in landfill anyway so it gets tossed in the trash

@Steve_M at some recyclinginstitues yes. At others they use IR and spectrometer to sort out bits of plastics. Which is very impressive

@VolksTrieb Germany is pretty unique in this case. Incinerating plastics is really bad for the environment, and Germany has strict waste disposal laws (as you know) so there’s a lot of incentive to be thorough with recycling. Most countries globally don’t try anywhere near as hard to recycle plastics. In most parts of the US the best you’ll find for household waste plastic recycling is PET and PE bottles, MAYBE other labeled plastics like ABS in some places. And they usually get downcycled into carpet or similar due to purity issues rather than made back into more bottles.

@Ryan_Carlyle yes thats my understanding of it too. But bottles also get downcycled here sadly. There are bottles which just gwt washed and reused but the oneway bottles get sold much much cheaper so more people buy these. Which get shreded and made into packagingbands and cloth… Sadly…

I use it for putting some weight on huge pieces that doesnt need infill. I printed a huge bust recently and it was hollow, so I put inside most of the failed prints I had

I just toss it out. Would love to build a Filastruder someday though.

@Ashley_Webster Okay I think I might need some pics of this orb.

The orb is a seriously amazing ideal though.

@Ryan_Carlyle yeah a big ball of ABS/PLA/nylon/PETG/TPU

Need to add an option: keep it in plastic tubs in perpetuity hoping one day I’ll have the inclination to build a filament extruder.

@Michael_Scholtz I feel like I go through a cycle like that every 3 months and I eventually just decide to trash it.

There is an instructable on recycling the filament that should help

@John_Brogan Link?