maybe a silly idea

My missus drinks lemonade alot atleast two 2 litre bottles a day what would the process be to turn it into filament also to use the same process to recycle failed printed objects cheers any links posted to look at other peoples recycling projects thanks

I'd love to hear about recycling old prints. I've got a bench full of mangled prints from just 2 days

Yes ditto. There are filament extruders on Thingiverse.
I have been wondering about recycling plastic milk bottles - we have 2 litre bottles made out of that semi-transparent plastic, feels like PLA.

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Richmond, New Zealand
Thingiverse ~ YouTube

I think the best long-term solution would be an extruder that works with pellets/reground waste. That way you wouldn't need to re-extrude into filament form before you could re-use your old stuff.

I've seen some posts/blogs devoted to such efforts but the technical problems are harder to overcome than it originally appears.

Why wouldnt you want to extrude into filament first?

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-Tom

I wonder if recycling plastic might be easier with SLS, where you don't need to be as concerned about the consistency of the plastic.

Chris33 - The process for recycling plastic bottles into filament is generally clean, then shred, then extrude. Whether you extrude into filament, then print with that, or extrude directly from the shredded plastic depends on the quality you want.

Sniper4395 - Constantly remelting plastic can cause it to loose some of its desirable properties, with regards to bonding and warpage, so if you want really consistent properties you may want to stick to flake extrusion. The problem there is that extruding flakes is not nearly as precise as a filament.

Wired1 - Milk jugs are usually made out of HDPE. It's pretty difficult to print with, as the amount that it shrinks as it cools is crazy high. It's definitely possible, though, as the group I am involved in (WOOF) managed to print a full size (7 foot long) working canoe out of 250 recycled milk jugs. For info on our print, check out our blog! You will have to go back to around March or April to see when we started work on Big Red (Our large scale printer).

The Makibox project seems to be next to able to have reliable extrusion from pellets... Not yet chips from recycling, but still a nice step forward.

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Most of my technical comments should be correct, but is THIS one ?
Anyway, as a rule of thumb, always double check what people write.