When we covered Liz Havlin’s recycled plastic desktop extruder last May she was just testing the Kickstarter platform to find out whether her idea of a machine capable of extruding FDM filament from recycled plastic pellets would be appealing to the 3D printing community.
Apparently it was and it is, since her project shot through the Kickstarter funding goal of $5000 and is already 60% past that with still close to one month left to go. Granted, $5000 was not a very high goal, particularly considering what Liz has in mind — an open source system to help the world rid itself of plastic waste.
The initial dream was to make an extruder that would be able to create filament from ground up plastic and, while the test worked, the results were not consistent enough. For filament to be uniform and not jam in 3D printers, the plastic used needs to be clean and fully dry. This goal is still in the works, and Liz is sharing her R&D work with anyone wanting to contribute, though for the time being the Legacy extruder will use pellets made out of recycled plastic produced by a range of suppliers,
Liz was able to work out a deal where plastic pellet producers agreed to trade collected recycling for new pellets to pass on to future Legacy extruder customers. She is thus working to set up plastic waste collection sites in all 50 US States as well as in other nations throughout the world. For example she is partnering with Protoprint, an Indian project to work directly with waste pickers to create income through plastic recycling. For every five extruders pledged for on Kickstarter, one will be sent to Protoprint.
Minor pledges give access to filament spools or to the original Lyman Filament Spool Winder (which is the base project the Legacy Extruder was developed on). A fully assembled Legacy Extruder starts at $499 (all gone) and $549 for the second production run. Delivery is expected for February 2015. Mark that date: if everything goes according to Liz’s plans, it might be the beginning of a massive global plastic clean up.
