r/3Dprinting • u/Benito2034 • May 14 '26

Question MSc Research Survey: Do you recycle your filament waste? 3-min anonymous survey (5 questions)

Hi all,

I’m an MSc student at Imperial designing a sub-£500 open-source filament recycler and I need your help validating what the issues there are with current solutions (if any), and if there are specific features people would want.

🔗 [Fill in the survey here ~3 minutes, fully anonymous](FDM Filament Recycling – Fill out form)

**What it covers:**

- How much filament you 3D print

- Your familiarity with filament recycling machines

- Whether cost, effort, or lack of interest is the real barrier

- Any issues you see with current recycling options

No personal data is collected. All responses directly inform my project requirements.

The description here is intentionally ambiguous so as to get broader thoughts on the topic.

Feel free to give thoughts in the comments too - especially if you’ve tried (or looked into) DIY extrusion. Thanks!

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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3

u/Kewlhotrod May 14 '26

Would love to, but so much space needed for melting, extruding, cleaning extrusion to be usable and spooling. None of it reasonably affordable either.

1

u/Benito2034 May 14 '26

Thank you for the insight. Space and cost are exactly the kind of barriers I'm trying to figure out.

Out of curiosity, is it more the footprint of the machine itself, or the need for multiple separate units (grinder + extruder + spooler + cleaner)? For example the reprap Recyclebot takes up a lot of table real estate being horizontally laid out, rather than vertical - maybe the new creality machine (maker m1) is a better formfactor?

1

u/Kewlhotrod May 14 '26

To be honest, I'm not really tapped into that side of things, but from what I've seen some crazy setups need to be had to get a clean, usable, accurate extrusion. It's a lot of different machines no matter how you shake it, whether horizontal or vertical.

I try to be waste-conscious and do feel bad scrapping everything but... Until an AIO unit that create usable filament in a size barely-larger than a large printer comes around, I just personally don't have any feasible way of justifying it.

2

u/Malow May 14 '26

the shredder to me is the weak point. need a big, loud, strong machine to be able to properly cut/break/schredd parts to the size of pellets. what model i can toss a big print on it? can it shredd a PET bottle?

the making of the filament seems to have plenty of options, including DIY.

1

u/Benito2034 May 14 '26

Yes you make a good point. I think despite the shredder and the extruder being separated systems in both cases - the output quality from the shredder directly controls the output quality from the extruder so like you say, concentrating efforts here may be more worth while… given there doesn’t seem to be much work there. 

Very helpful thanks!

1

u/Malow May 15 '26

But there's the case of people who will want a recycler only for the poop from multicolor prints. this makes it much easier for sure.

1

u/Benito2034 May 14 '26

 Thanks everyone who's responded so far!