I spoke with the sponsor as we are getting mighty low on filament in the space. Unfortunately, they are just about out of filament, and they are in mid-switch to in-house production, and it’s hitting some snags. I don’t have an ETA on when we will get more, so the last two boxes of Fulament are what we got until it’s gone. Keep in mind there is a bin with spools in bags available for use, but if you plan to print a lot, you may want to consider picking up spools from Amazon or such.
Fusion Filaments is by far the best solution for filament recycling I’ve found.
They take PLA, ABS, ASA, PETG, and PET. Read the site for full details on what’s accepted.
They don’t charge a service fee BUT you do have to pay shipping. If you email them, they will try to get the slowest, cheapest, commercial freight shipping rate- I think last the last time I sent 20lb of PLA and PETG scraps, I paid $15 in shipping? The guy who runs it is also nice and cool and stuff, hangs out in a buncha discord servers.
It still kind of sucks to pay to get rid of stuff but I feel better knowing it’s certainly being remade into filament and not sitting in a landfill forever. And it’s a far better price than some services I’ve seen charging you $150 a box to… throw away plastic? Who the hell would do that?
I need to finish drafting a smol proposal for recycling boxes in the space to put your supports, failed prints, old prototypes, etc, that we’d send off to Fusion.
On the stock status front, anyone interested on buying some in bulk? I’d be happy to pitch in as I’ll be printing quite a bit more in the following months. Think I’ll need PLA and would like to try both PETG and TPU at the very least.
You may want to see if Austin has some program that would pay us a grant for recycling so we wouldn’t have to foot the bill to send filament to someone to repurpose it and then sell it for profit. A quick glance on their site shows that they are an LLC and not a non-profit, but they consider any scraps that are sent to them as a “Donation.” But I digress; there are pros and cons to discuss once the proposal is completed.
Yea, it’s not perfect at all and I really wish they’d pay shipping since they’re profiting off of it. Lesser of two evils with the alternative of it just permanently sitting in the landfill or floating in the ocean though tbh
I think that is kinda the backstory for a recent indie video game that I highly recommend –