Does any of you have any experience with this? I’m looking at the Felfil Evo pellet extruder which seems like an acceptable option. One thing I don’t understand. Why are the shredder and spooler so ungodly expensive?
I mean, can’t you just use an old blender to grind pieces down far enough for the pellet extruder? The finer the better no? Airborne microplastic may be a concern at some point.
Also the spooler. Is that more complicated than a stepper motor that runs at a certain RPM spinning the spool around? With perhaps a mechanism that slows down a bit after X rotations to compensate for the spool getting thicker. Nothing an Arduino can’t handle. Also don’t grip the spool that tightly so pull strength is more or less equal.
Both the spooler and shredder individually cost more than a pellet extruder does…
Alternatively, what’s impossible for an individual might be possible for a group. A makerspace with enough members who are into 3D printing might be able to break even on a macerator, extruder, and spooler in a reasonable amount of time by reselling the filament. Say maybe 30 people each producing a kg of waste PLA per year?
Hmm. Pinning some numbers on this . . . The Filabot EX2 is an extrusion and spooling setup for $6,560.70 USD . Plus the bill of parts for a DIY macerator . . . let’s call it $7000, because round numbers are nice. $1000 a year would pay this off in a not-unreasonable amount of time. So you’d need to produce 100 spools at $10 or 50 spools at $20. If you’re only clearing 30kg of waste per year, and selling 1kg spools at $20, that’s $600/year and about 12 years to pay off the rig. Still not completely out of the question, I guess.
Yeah but you’re not selling waste spools at $20 when new pla is $10 to $20
I admit you’d be limiting your market to people who consider “helping the environment feels good” to be worth at least $5 if you price the spools at $20 USD. If you want to price it lower, you need more waste, though. So for now, the economics don’t really work out unless we’re talking about really large groups of hobbyist printers, or waste from a business. 🤷