Upcycled Cutting boards

Cutting boards and plates from recycled print filament:

With every few successful printing projects, comes a one that doesn’t work out.

Whether it didn’t print well, or just wasn’t needed anymore, I eventually accumulated a large quantity of scrap plastic material of many colors and types. Since I didn’t want to just throw everything out, I decided to see if I could possibly recycle all this waste material.

My solution to this situation was to melt all this down into something useful. Since PLA melted at a fairly low temp, I found that I could melt down my scrap filament into these neat little plastic plates. For the molds, I would simply just use non-stick pans pilled full of excess material. After cooking for around an hour in the oven, the end results would be truly unique each time, as the very irregular shapes of bits of plastic would melt and deform somewhat unpredictably.

It takes me a couple of months of constant printing to generate enough waste material for just one of these pieces, but it ensures that nothing truly goes to waste here.

Waste material from failures and support structure