The Reprap's impact on the environment

Anton, that's an interesting CO2 analysis, and good info on the Wiki page.

One more thing to consider, though, is the renewable aspect of PLA compared to ABS.

Even if the CO2 situation is a wash, I think the fact that PLA can be biodegraded, and re used to grow more PLA makes it much more attractive for me. One of the main problems with traditional plastics is the fact that they do not biodegrade easily.

The third world, and manufacturing centers like Taiwan and China are covered in plastic garbage that does not decompose and does not go away, and can not be recycled into quality goods. If switching to PLA will reduce that even a little bit, I think it would be a huge advantage. It's one of the main reasons I use PLA, besides the fact that it produces better prints than ABS on my machines.

One question I do have, is what exactly is required to decompose PLA. It may be so tough that it's not economically feasible.

Wade

One question I do have, is what exactly is required to decompose PLA.
PLA is supposed to be biodegradeable and compostable.
[en.wikipedia.org]

I don't know if that will happen in a home's compost heap, or only in the hotter-temperature municipal compost heaps. One of those 'try-it-and-see' things, or spend a while on google/google scholar, if anyone is interested.

Also, it's "Type 0" according to this proposal:
[en.wikipedia.org]

Although this is all just more motivation for the Recycler folk to figure this stuff out.

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-Sebastien, RepRap.org library gnome.

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Remember, you're all RepRap developers (once you've joined the super-secret developer mailing list), and the wiki, RepRap.org, [reprap.org] is for everyone and everything!

Keep in mind that in the plastics fabrication industry that a rule of thumb is that you can use about 50% recycled plastic/50% new resin and get an acceptable product.

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Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

Anton,
I only just finished reading your wiki page on environmental impacts of various possible extruder plastics. Very well done! And may I say, your english is FAR better than I can speak _any_ other language!

Sebastian has a good point that if we have an environmental impact discussion block on every new reprap design, we may scare away new readers. I am will to split the difference, start with a 'default statement' saying that local production of good from simple, universal raw materials should greatly decrease the current, high distance traveling, world economy. Within the bounds that all repraps hope to decrease transportation related fuel consumption and pollution (even if all reprap 'food' and 'vitamins' still come from China, the lack of specialization means that the cheapest, often slowest, but least polluting form of transport will be prefered), I can see opening debate on how this design compares with other repraps, rather than a less apples-to-apples comparison of worldwide repraps compared to a perfect world with no want or pollution. I offer to add such a section to my Open Air reprap project, just as soon as I figure out how to add a new page to the wiki and edit the template to describe my current thoughts.

A request to either expand your current wiki page on lifecycle costs, or add another, is to start comparing the mechanical, structural, electrical, and ease of use in a fabricator of all the materials people are suggesting. Home grown PLA may beat everything else hands down on environmental costs, but if it can never be strong enough, or handle high enough temps for a specific task, then until we can find a better material, we may have to fall back on ABS, at least for the tough stuff. Being able to balance functionality against lifecycle costs would help us make more informed decisions on what we use, and where we need to look harder for alternatives.

Mike

I don't think that there is much danger of Reprap allowing environmental activists, however well meaning, to exercise a precautionary principle veto over technological research. I know I certainly won't.

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Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

yea, the only way to stop people from making and using repraps would be to destroy all knowledge of how to do it or even the concepts. which would require killing everyone that has any knowledge of the technology. This will not happen as long as there are people living so i realy have little fear of anyone being able to restrict research in this knowledge.

My two pennyworth.

The reason the industrial revolution happened in the first place was to improve efficiency. There are many arguments that the reprap will reduce energy requirements, but this is just plain wrong.

Large manufacturing plants are extremely energy efficient compared to distributed manufacturing which is the main reason they exist. Imagine the energy requirements to make all the parts for a motor vehicle on a reprap machine (if it were possible in the future) the energy requirements would be immense.

By that time in the future conventional manufacturing facilities will have improved efficiency beyond what we have today and may even incorporate rapid prototyping technology as it matures to replace the metal bashing we currently have. This is already happening in the automotive industry where I work, the main reason is that for some production it is cheaper (efficient!!). In addition the factory where I work takes NO energy from the outside, this was done easily by erecting two massive wind turbines, with a third to follow soon. This as you can see was much simpler and energy efficient than getting everyone with a reprap machine to put a turbine on their house.

PLA is a great material for the environment, but even this will still be more efficiently produced in a large facility than in a tub in your back garden. Transport costs are a tiny part of the energy required to produce an object.

Where the reprap project scores over large scale manufacturing is the ability to promote quick innovation and "Distributed Thinking". I think this is where our thoughts should be concentrated. Some guy somewhere (probably with a reprap machine on his desk) will come up with a new idea that may cure all our environmental worries (reprapped birth control perhaps!). What we are developing here is the tools for him or her to do that.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/21/2010 06:13AM by martinprice2004.

martinprice: You've made some interesting assertions. It would be nice to see some published numbers, or any numbers for that matter. Don't forget to factor in transport and distribution costs into the manufacturing costs incurred by your "extremely energy efficient" factories.

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Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

Here's an interesting study on the environmental impact of solid freeform fabrication processes. Of course they assume that the parts produced are for prototyping are immediately discarded and it's quite old. Turns out FDM is the best and worst of all freeform fabrication processes(it's the absolute best if you do recycling). Unfortunately they don't compare these processes to conventional manufacturing processes like machining...

Environmental Performance Analysis for Solid Freeform Fabrication
ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/6206/16579/00765837.pdf?arnumber=76583

It might be interesting to plug in the values for RepRap Mendel and Darwin into their analysis to see how it stacks up. If anything it'd sure be interesting to see RepRap's KWh/kg value.

Um... that's a members only website.

Here's an open link for the article.

[scholarsmine.mst.edu]

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Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

Interesting analysis. Plugging my 0.3 mm extruder Rapman 3.0 into the analysis when it is running at a head speed of 16 mm/sec, about the upper limit for really fine detail work, I find that I am using about 10 Kw-hr/kg of ABS extruded. Not bad.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/25/2010 08:15AM by Forrest Higgs.

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Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

I may have a different point of view than most, but here it goes:

An assumption with a lot of economic reckoning is that it's a zero-sum game; that, if one person doesn't manufacture something, somebody else will because there's a demand for it. This is pretty untrue. A modern industrial society perpetuates itself - people buy things from companies because the companies pay for marketing which needs to be paid for by people buying things from the company. The modern economy is a pretty much pyramid scheme - either the raw materials or the consumer market will run out eventually, though increasing exploitation of the environment and consumers seems to be staving it off.

Doing it yourself circumvents a lot of problems. Because there is no benefit to making more things, they will not be overproduced - actually, less things will be produced because raw material will be actively conserved. Also, the free flow of ideas associated with Reprap ensures that things will get progressively more efficient. There will be no planned obsolescence with Reprap. It effectively unifies the consumer and producer to make sure that the consumers' interests are always there, rather than sidelined for more profit.

Doing things yourself, I think, basically destroys consumerism, and consumerism is probably the biggest environmental problem.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/26/2010 01:09AM by wayland.

Not sure I agree about the pyramid scheme analysis, but this is a very pertinent point by wayland: "Because there is no benefit to making more things, they will not be overproduced."

You print precisely how many objects you need, whenever you need them. So you don't need to mass-produce stuff that sits on shelves, never used, and just becomes waste.

Forrest Higgs Wrote:
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> martinprice: You've made some interesting
> assertions. It would be nice to see some
> published numbers, or any numbers for that matter.
> Don't forget to factor in transport and
> distribution costs into the manufacturing costs
> incurred by your "extremely energy efficient"
> factories.

The reason I haven't put in many statistics or quotes is that it is a little pointless. I could easily find statistics that argue both sides of the story as I'm sure you could. The point I was trying to make was that it is more efficient to produce stuff in large numbers than small distributed numbers.

The transport and distribution issue is a little misleading, Manufacturing raw materials locally is a nice idea, but wont work on a global scale. There is already a large lobby against biofuels as there is insufficient land to grow all this fuel and feed the world at the same time. Can you honestly see a world of 7 billion people all with repraps, solar panels and algae tanks on the roof in the near future? By the time this happens there will be 10 billion people shoulder to shoulder and hungry. In addition during this transition period to a reprap utopia, the energy demand will increase beyond all reason before it goes down. My energy demands alone have gone up since I aquired a makerbot and as of yet I have only made a whistle and the beginnings of a new machine, let alone the energy costs of items I have had delivered from all over the world.

I can see a future with very efficient factories and low energy transport. both of which are achievable as there are many demonstration projects already.

Disclaimer: this is just my (admittedly radical) interpretation of these things.

Efficient how?

If you mean electricity-efficient, I feel like reprap provides much more flexibility for using sustainable energy sources. It's easier to power your reprap with homemade windmills than a manufacturing plant.

If you mean cost, you're not factoring in profit and labor. It may be cheaper to make a part in a factory, but if you don't have access to a factory, it's much cheaper to make a piece on a reprap than it is to buy it.

Saying biofuels are not good uses of land is a pretty misleading. Modern agriculture uses land awfully - it is almost complete monoculture, and, although they use crop rotation to an extent, it's still bad for the land. You can support four people on a half-acre of land - there are currently 954,752,502 acres of farmland in the US, which if farmed carefully and with individual attention, could support 954,752,502 * 2 * 4 = 7,638,020,016 people. That's way more people than we have. Sure, people would have to de-specialize a lot and learn how to do things themselves, but it's a possibility. Also, it seems like an extrapolation of the Reprap project's ideals.

Another thing is that a lot of problems with food have to do with globalization - ever notice how third world countries become exponentially poorer after beginning trade with "first-world" countries? - and overconsumption by the upper classes of, mainly, the USA. If you want to get into this more, I could go ahead, but maybe this forum is not the best place for it.

Also, I think you make the pretty-dumb-but-common "omniscient" view of those ten million (or 7 million?) people being unable to do anything themselves. Each of those people could be as curious as we are about making and building things. The only thing holding them back is class and lack of resources. But maybe I'm wrong or projecting ideas onto you (I'm not trying to).

Wow I never expected this thread to reach it's second page. I hope I do not get banned here.

Ok I have to say this thread is not very productive, what is the point to come to some conclusion and shut down RepRap development all over the world?

No creative effort is ever wasted as some portion of it will be reused for something of value, at some point in time. So splitting hairs about whether it’s better to produce parts one off or in china in the millions is pure wasted effort.

Your missing the point, with the advances in micro material science we may want to extrude plastic that is 1000 times stronger in steel (Micro lignite particles from trees), on a regular basis.

The latest argument is about over production in factories. You know that’s one of the beneficial powers of inertia, people made money doing this in the past, just make more of them!

I agree that nothing can (or should) stop this creativity, but if we're headed towards a design that we cannot sustain, we want to gently nudge away from that before we get too heavily invested in that design, you know?

freds and wayland: {btw, very nice choice of screen name, wayland}

I've seen this happen any number of times in different threads. Basically, you have Reprap, which is predicated on viral technology distribution and reducing the scale of manufacturing dramatically so that production localises. That's extremely revolutionary and is going to draw a lot of criticism because it threatens a lot of traditional manufacturing companies and a big part of the Chinese economy.

What's fun is both the far left, because of Marx's writings, and the "free enterprise" far right are both heavily vested in the notion that manufacturing is a large scale enterprise. Reprap is the antithesis of that. What that means is that both the far left and the far right are very quickly going to be after our blood. Indeed, it's already begun.

Not that long ago, the enviroNazis were trying on the notion that personal 3D printing ought to be made illegal because it will be creating a solid waste problem. As well, the notion that fumes off plastic being printed is a serious health and safety risk is getting tried out, too.

From the far right we're now beginning to see self-appointed high priests of traditional large-scale manufacturing showing up demanding that we take on faith alone that, as we've been seeing in this tread, what we are doing is wrong and we ought to stop.

I'm a crude guy and my response to this sort of bullshit is, "Fuck the bunch of them and the horses they rode in on!"

Expect to see these bastards pretty soon starting to lawyer up and buy Congressmen {always a favourite} and, on the one hand, try to stop us in civil courts like the RIAA/MPAA have been doing and on the other, buying laws that declare what we're doing to be criminal. That's as American as Apple pie. Our criminal codes are chock full of recent laws making behaviours that were perfectly legal fifty years ago felonies today. Doing things that our parents and grandparents, the "Greatest Generation", thought were perfectly ordinary would get them sent to state prisons with serious sentences in this sad 21st century.

This will not be a left-wing or right-wing thing. Remember that the Micky Mouse Protection Act, which turned copyright law into an obscenity, was a bipartisian effort started by a Republican. DC is full of lawyers and legislators who just LOVE doing this kind of thing, don'tchaknow.

><

Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 03/29/2010 11:27AM by Forrest Higgs.

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Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

I have read through all the comments and was surprised to notice no one mentioned the environmental saving that the lack of packaging creates. If everything consumed in the world came without packaging we would reduce waste and energy consumption drastically. You would think the energy used to ship 5kg of filament is the same as shipping 5kg of finished products, but after packaging that same 5kg of finished product we now have to ship 7kg? and takes up more space, increasing the energy used to ship plus the materials and energy used for the packaging. It's clear to me that home production has many benefits, the main being production for USE not for sale because it may be profitable.

The only threat to home production is commercialism.