PETFusion 2.0 Helps You Turn Old Plastic Bottles Into 3D Printer Filament

Plastics are amazing materials that are strong, durable, easy to use in manufacturing, resistant to many chemicals and weather, and incredibly economical. But those properties have also led to serious environmental problems, as we continue to use plastics with reckless abandon. And as experts will tell anyone willing to listen, general household recycling barely puts a dent in the problem. But what if you could recycle plastic into practical new creations yourself? Now that may be feasible, thanks to the launch of PETFusion 2.0 on Kickstarter.

3D printing is often vilified as being wasteful, because the FDM process usually relies entirely on thermoplastics. The truth is that 3D printing happens on such a small scale, compared to industrial manufacturing, that it isn’t worth worrying about right now — there are much, much bigger fish to fry. But even so, recycling for 3D printing is an attractive idea. Not only would it reduce plastic waste, it might even save the user some money along the way.

PETFusion 2.0 is a device that turns plastic bottles into filament ready to feed into a 3D printer. This Kickstarter campaign is for the STL files, BoM (Bill of Materials), and instructions to build your own PETFusion 2.0—there isn’t an option to purchase an actual, physical device.

This idea of turning plastic waste into 3D printer filament is an old one and many designs similar to PETFusion 2.0 have come and gone over the years. The basic operation is simple: cut plastic bottles into strips, feeds those into a hot end, extrude filament, and spool it up. This is intended to work solely with plastic bottles made from PET and that is the biggest drawback. PET bottles are certainly common, but they’re only a fraction of overall waste. The other big drawback is quality. Making good filament is actually a pretty difficult undertaking, as the tolerances are fairly tight. These hobbyist filament extrusion machines struggle to maintain decent tolerances and PET isn’t a great material choice anyway.

Potential shortcomings aside, PETFusion 2.0 seems to be capable of producing usable filament for non-critical parts. And it has three neat tricks: a filament welder, two hot ends for extrusion, and a built-in bottle cutter system. The filament welder is a third hot end the user can melt filament with in order to bond two strands together, which is ideal for turning several bottles into one big spool.

If you want to build your own PETFusion 2.0, you have until January 26th to back the campaign and get the files for $39.