Comment by esquire_900
12 hours ago
So the author recycled 10 pounds of plastic, but used 8.5 pounds of glue to do so (184 sticks at 0.74 oz which seems to be average for glue sticks).
Cool project, but that ratio seems very ineffective. Especially since there is a realistic chance this ends up in landfill within some decades anyway.
Like those "wood" tables that are 50% made of epoxy. It grinds my gears
I'm so glad that fad is over. My mother worked as a theatre artisan before retirement and it was, among other things, fumes from curing epoxy that caused numerous health issues down the line.
I am curious about the down-the-line effects of fumes from printing PLA and PETG. Reddit posts suggest no ill effects, but it hasn’t been long enough in the hobbyist world.
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Most of the environmental cost of plastic happens when it’s made. Once it exists, burying it in landfill isn’t nearly as bad as many people think.
95+% of the carbon footprint of plastics comes from production and manufacturing.
Isn’t plastic nearly free as a raw material as a by product of fossil fuel production? I was always told it’s the opposite, plastic bags are better for the environment if disposed of properly because they’re so light weight to transport, didn’t need to be farmed, and companies basically give away the raw material because it would be more expensive to dispose of. A cotton bag needs to be reused upwards 1000x to be less impactful, or was I bamboozled?
We now know that, contrary to the cotton bag, they turn into microplastics which cost way more to remove from the environment than that reusable bag.
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> Isn’t plastic nearly free as a raw material as a by product of fossil fuel production?
Yes and no. Oil is cracked down for lots of different things, but one of the things that people are really aiming for is ethane which can be used to make industrial ethanol, and a lot of plastics.
What you end up with to get there is lots of propane and butane, which is used as a fuel gas, but most of that ends up going up the flare stack because there's so much of it. We won't stop doing this while we still use plastics and fertiliser.
You need very clean propane or butane for things like cooking stoves, but you can run car engines on it just fine because they're so much less picky, and the exhaust gases are far cleaner than engines run on heavier fractions like oh maybe octane. This is why things like warehouse forklifts run on gas instead of diesel or petrol - you don't die if you breathe in the fumes, because there's no unburnt fuel or carbon monoxide, because it runs as lean as a vegan's dog.
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It also burns quite well. If are in a location that burns trash in waste-to-energy plants you can get a decent amount of that energy back by throwing it away
"burying it in landfill isn’t nearly as bad as many people think."
I think you're full of shit.
Honestly wtf does the glue matter when people are going through plastic like it's nothing? Bringing up the glue is such a weird nitpick.
Why use glue at all, he should have done this using a 'stained glass' method. Build some kind of a frame for each area of color and then melt the filimant into it.
When the ratio is almost 1:1 it is a bit more than a nit.
Do nothing: 10 pounds of filament poop has go to the landfill.
Do this thing: 10 pounds of filament poop still exists, + 8 pounds of glue sticks (which is basically a thermoplastic) used, to create something that's eventually going to end up in a landfill.
Are you being deliberately obtuse?
Recycling or reuse is not as useful as just not creating waste in the first place.
Maybe it looks more amazing in person than in pictures. If not, and the point is a message about waste, then the 80% increase could be cast as part of the message.
Let’s say every month the artist repurposes the last pile of plastic with more glue. At the end of one year, the 10lbs would turn into 1100lbs. At the end of two years the original 10lbs would have turned into 1.3 million lbs of plastic waste. Surely that would frame a very powerful message about plastic waste and green washing misleading public policy.
So... don't 3D print anything?
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hot glue is a petrochemical just like plastic.
They do make biodegradable hot glue [1] but it's still not perfect. It's biodegradable and certified compostable under industrial conditions but it still has a polymer base. It's also not ideal for projects that are always in UV light.
https://www.poweradhesives.com/adhesives/tecbond-214b/
It is plastic, nothing else.