We’ve heard of plastic bottles being turned into beanies, jeans and even a house. Now, with this new 3D printer, you can make just about anything you want from the environmental menace.
The Ekocycle Cube 3D printer from 3D Systems uses filament made in part from recycled PET bottles. From it, the printer can make items such as bracelets, cellphone cases, shoes, and whatever these awesome-looking things are. So far, the filament comes in red, black, white and natural (with reports saying more colors will be coming in the future).
Musician and producer will.i.am, the chief creative officer at 3D Systems, teamed up with Coca-Cola to launch the printer, which will retail for $1,199 later this year.
MORE: Coca-Cola Shows There’s Nothing Like a Fun Incentive to Encourage Recycling
While price tag may be a bit much, the Black Eyed Peas band member says this is just the beginning of eco-friendly printing technology.
“We will make it cool to recycle, and we will make it cool to make products using recycled materials,” he said. “This is the beginning of a more sustainable 3D-printed lifestyle. Waste is only waste if we waste it.”
He clearly has a point. The plastic bottle is so ubiquitous that the average American home probably has a few lying around the house right now. According to CleanAir.org, 2.4 million tons of PET plastic is discarded a year, with 75 percent going to the landfills.
So whether you’re turning your bottles into bracelets or tossing them in a bin to be reused in some other fashion, please find a way to recycle every single one.
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Tag: 3D printer
What If You Could Make Custom Clothes With the Click of a Button?
For fashionistas, on-demand apparel sounds too good to be true. But a new startup called Electroloom is developing a 3D printer that would be able to create basic clothes, like t-shirts and sweaters, with a push of a button. The product, created by entrepreneur Aaron Rowley, is not fully developed yet, but it recently won a grant from Alternative Apparel, an Atlanta-based apparel company that is dedicated to social responsibility and eco-conscious design, due to the product’s focus on sustainability. “Something we are compelled by is embodied energy [which is] essentially the amount of energy that was used to take a raw material to a finished good,” Rowley told Fast Company. “So a goal of this project is to reduce the amount of embodied energy in an article of clothing.”
So far, the Electroloom has managed to print sheets and tubes of polymer fabrics. With support from the Alternative Grant, the team will try more complicated patterns and fibers that more closely resemble cotton. (Natural fibers like cotton are easily destroyed during printing.) Eventually, Rowley envisions the Electroloom brand as an open-source concept, including an online database of workable designs crowdsourced by users. The Electroloom should be ready for an end-of-2014 launch, just in time for the stylish set to print some clothes for fashion week.
MORE: These College Students Couldn’t Afford a 3D Printer. So They Built One.
How a Jump Rope Could Bring Electricity to the Developing World
In many developing nations, electricity isn’t a guarantee, it’s a privilege. With this in mind, Uncharted Play, a New York-based startup, created the PULSE jump rope, a seemingly simple toy with a big mission: to bring renewable, affordable power to places where electricity is scarce. The PULSE jump rope is made of durable plastic with 3D-printed handles. With each skip of the rope, the device converts the kinetic energy from play into electricity and stores it in the handles for future use. Users can then connect and juice up cell phones, lights or other small gadgets. While the PULSE is currently in beta, with only 100 samples available from the company for $129 each, the company hopes to produce the jump rope at a more affordable price, in order for it to reach the communities it was designed to help.
MORE: $95 Device Lets You Charge Your Phone with Energy from Riding Your Bike
These College Students Couldn’t Afford a 3D Printer. So They Built One.
For SUNY Purchase student Shai Schecter, the 3D printer on campus wasn’t a viable option due to its high cost and lack of usability. So Schecter enlisted the help of three friends to build a low-cost 3D printer that uses plastic. The Deltaprintr is a streamlined product that creates prints that are comparable to the high-end printers on the market, but at a fraction of the cost. What started as a project that would make affordable 3D printing available as a learning tool for educational institutions has been met and surpassed, as the Deltaprintr nearly sold out of preorders on Kickstarter in one week alone — an incredible feat for a team of twenty-somethings hoping to close the gap between professional and educational tech.
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