The amount of plastic thrown into landfills, which is hundreds of thousands of pounds annually, is increasing as new technologies, such as 3D printing, are on the rise. The REFil- Recycling Excess Filament Creative Inquiry project, mentored by Dr. William Martin from the Department of General Engineering, focuses on repurposing polylactic acid (PLA) waste from 3D printing facilities into recycled filament. Without the efforts of this Creative Inquiry team, PLA waste ends up in a landfill, but now it has a new life.  

To make a batch of recycled filament, the team collects a large bin full of discarded PLA material from 3D printing facilities on campus. They grind the waste up and funnel it into a filament maker, where it is melted and blended before it is spooled outside of the machine. The result is a spool of recycled filament ready to make new 3D prints.  

The team wants to provide a consistent mechanism for Clemson University to make and use spools of 100% recycled filament; however, the challenge lies with consistency issues in the recycled spool. “For every week that we get a good run, we have a month of runs that weren’t so good,” Brandi Baldus, a junior materials science and engineering major, said. Since transforming waste from 3D printers into recycled material is a new endeavor, the team does not have experts to turn to. “Nobody knows the answer,” Sarah Maxwell, a junior computer engineering major, said. To troubleshoot, the team references online forums from the filament maker manufacturer’s website to inform manipulations to the process. They test the quality and consistency of the recycled filament by 3D printing a gecko and doorstop as test prints. If the filament passes, they distribute the recycled spools for students to use on their 3D printed projects.  

In the future, the team hopes to move the recycling process to the Makerspace at the Watt Family Innovation Center. There the filament maker will be able to work on a larger scale. The Watt Makerspace operates five days a week allowing the students to work with the filament machine more frequently. With more frequent runs, there will be faster progress making the filament more consistent and ready for everyday use.  

With every test run, the team gets closer and closer to unlocking the full potential of recycled filament.