Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of piling all of your junk into a couple of bins for the waste management people to take away, you could separate your plastics, paper, metal, compost, etc. and process what you can into reusable material? And it would be even more convenient and eco-friendly if you could just throw this crap into a machine, which would transform it into usable stuff again. According to Yanko Design, that’s the sort of idea that designers Yangzi Qin, Yingting Wang, Luckas Fischer and Hanying Xie have in mind with the 3D-Reprinter. You’d simply throw plastic refuse into your 3D-Reprinter and it would 3D print it into new, useful goods.
The device is in the conception stages, but it doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. On the one hand, the Filabot, and others like it, turns chopped up plastic pellets into 3D printer filament. On the other hand, the David 3D printer from Sculptify fabricates objects directly from pellets. The FilaMaker uses a shredding mechanism to grind plastic waste directly into filament. A combination of the FilaMaker and David would make the 3D-Reprinter a reality, but the work going into building the device is easier said than done! In addition to the engineering of the 3D-Reprinter, it’d be necessary to ensure that the material processed by the machine was pure enough to use.
If there were devices like the 3D-Reprinter around, though, people could clean their old bottles, throw them into the machine, and create goods all over the house. You throw in something that can melt down metal and 3D print objects made from your old aluminum cans and you’re in business! Your compost? That’s fertile soil for your garden! All that’s left is converting your old garbage (not to mention precious bodily fluids) into energy with microbial fuel cells and you’re practically self-sustaining. Well done, Yangzi Qin, Yingting Wang, Luckas Fischer and Hanying Xie! Now you’ve got me living in a fantasy world!
