Reduce, reuse, recycle. We all know the phrase, have seen it written on recycling bins and heard it said in presentations on environmental sustainability. Using these principles to help guide the way you run your 3D print lab can make your operation more sustainable - not just environmentally, but for you and your team.

In today’s article, we’ll discuss how 3D print farm automation allows you to abide by these principles, resulting in a more environmentally sound operation while making life easier for the people who run it.

Reduce: Minimize Resource Waste

Generally, reduce refers to minimizing the amount of waste we produce, but in 3D printing, there are different kinds of waste that naturally occur. A sustainable 3D print lab finds places to reduce unnecessary waste, from filament and single-use adhesives, to electricity, to your time.

There are three main kinds of material waste that 3D printing operations tend to face: wasted filament from fails, worn down print surfaces from rounds of adhesive and solvents, and broken-down 3D printers from high utilization.

All of these issues can be expensive and can cause a domino effect, where a worn down print bed causes more print fails, in turn wasting material and wearing the printers down more quickly.

Filament Waste

In an academic environment, print fails are somewhat inevitable. With students at varying experience levels in design, the risk of one of their models coming out a pile of spaghetti is non-zero. But fails don’t have to mean swaths of wasted filament.

Smart tools, like automated failure detection and response, are able to mitigate the negative impacts of print fails by stopping them before they progress. QuinlyVision™ AI is built into our 3D print farm management software AutoFarm^3D™, and detects a variety of 3D print fails in real-time. When a fail is detected, QuinlyVision continues monitoring it and AutoFarm^3D responds according to the sensitivity level you set.

If the issue is relatively minor (for example warping that doesn’t progress beyond an aesthetic issue), AutoFarm^3D will allow the printer to finish the print. On the other hand, if a student’s final project devolves into spaghetti, AutoFarm^3D will halt the print, wait until the printer cools down, and then auto eject the spaghetti pile and move on to the next print (or wait for you to attend to it, if you don’t have auto ejection).

This means less material is wasted; if spaghetti started 30 minutes into a 4 hour print and kept getting worse, AutoFarm^3D may abort the print at 40 minutes, whereas a 3D printer without automation would let it keep printing until the end unless a critical issue forced it to stop. This example resulted in over 3 hours of filament saved on just one print. Over the course of a school year, that can mean huge amounts of material saved.

Adhesives and Solvents

Applying adhesive to your print surface is common practice to make a print’s first layer stick better. It’s effective, but is not exactly the most planet-friendly practice, as buildup has to be removed frequently with solvents or harsh chemicals. Without adhesive, however, certain prints simply don’t work on standard PEI sheets.

Automatic part ejection helps solve this issue. Our VAAPR™ print bed has incredibly high adhesion when hot, which makes those prints possible without the use of adhesives. Moreover, adhesives, solvents, and other harsh chemicals actually damage the VAAPR’s surface. The only care it needs is for dust to be wiped off once in a while with a microfibre cloth, and less frequently it should be washed with regular Dawn dish soap (the kind with a duck on the front and no fancy name - other lines contain surfactants that cause issues).

Time

I know what you’re thinking: wasting my time isn’t bad for the environment!

But sustainable operations aren’t just about environmental sustainability, they’re about sustainable workflows. Working overtime just to make sure every student’s print gets done in time isn’t sustainable for you, which means it isn’t for your lab either. A self-sustaining lab is the ultimate goal: it takes fewer resources and gets the job done.

Not to mention environmental sustainability can’t be achieved without someone spearheading the effort. With your time tied up in hundreds of administrative tasks, who will take the time to craft and implement sustainability initiatives that put your 3D print lab at the forefront of lean manufacturing?

So, how can you reduce the amount of time wasted on repetitive urgent tasks? Eliminate those tasks by automating them. To find out how you can do this in your academic print lab, check out our blog on reducing administrative overload in academic print labs.

Reuse: Maximizing Equipment Life

The reuse principle in 3D printing translates to getting the most use out of your equipment, which means making an effort to extend the life of printers and replaceable components like print beds and nozzles.

Ultimately, extending hardware life comes down to two main things: quality equipment and proper maintenance.

Invest in Quality

There’s a reason why some people still wear their Doc Martens from the ‘90s, but buying a new pair now will only last you a couple years: material and construction quality make a huge difference in longevity.

A low-cost 3D printer today is significantly more reliable and durable than one from just five years ago. This improvement in quality has undoubtedly contributed to an overall decrease in the number of 3D printers that have to be trashed after a couple years. But depending on what you print, it can also be worth upgrading certain key components to further extend machine life.

Nozzles

Nozzle wear is common and becomes a particular issue when printing materials that require higher temperatures, like PETG. Replacing the stock nozzle with one designed to handle these extremes (like hardened steel) can more than triple the life span of that nozzle. Plus, it gives you spare stock nozzles to use on machines that print PLA and other lower temp materials.

Print Surface Wear

PEI sheets (the standard 3D print bed) have a finite lifespan. After enough printing they start to wear down and have issues with adhesion, which can be fixed the first few times by roughing up the surface, but eventually necessitates a new print bed. This eventuality becomes more frequent the more adhesives, solvents, and other chemicals are used.

Investing in long-lasting print surfaces, like VAAPR, can eliminate the need for replacement beds entirely. VAAPR’s unique properties that enable auto ejection also prevent it from wearing down, so it lasts forever, which is why we provide a lifetime warranty. Instead of replacing your print bed every few months (if you print in difficult materials like ABS) or every couple years (if you stick to PLA), VAAPR enables you to stick with one print bed for life, maximizing its use.

Maintenance > Repairs

Beyond investing in quality components, the best way to extend the lifespan of your printers is to maintain them preventatively instead of waiting until they break. To go back to the Doc Martens analogy - condition the leather and water-proof them before you trudge through damp snow in -3ºC, instead of trying to fix cracks after the fact.

One of the difficulties in maintaining preventatively is knowing what to do and finding the time to do it. Depending on your model of printer, different preventative maintenance may be required (if you’re interested in what this can look like, check out our blog on preventative maintenance for Prusa MK4). Most frequently preventative maintenance involves wiping down print beds, lubing lead screws, checking calibration, and inspecting the nozzle.

Finding the time to maintain preventatively is a different story.

Timing Maintenance

Not only is your time finite, your printers’ time is too. Taking printers offline for non-urgent maintenance feels like a mistake when you have 50 students waiting for their final projects to be printed. This is where our above points, about reducing wasted printer time and energy by transitioning to a 24h operation, come into play.

With printers running round-the-clock autonomously, your capacity is significantly higher. As a result, taking a couple printers offline for routine maintenance, which takes a few minutes, hardly impacts students’ wait times at all. Instead of waiting for a printer to break down and conducting time-consuming repairs, you can schedule in advance when it will be checked, minimizing the risk of damage due to fails and making your schedule more manageable.

Balance The Load

One last way to extend machine life is to make sure that all your machines are being used. If Printer A is always your go-to, it will undoubtedly reach the end of its life more quickly than Printer F, which you rarely use. But keeping track of which printer you last used is just one more layer of complexity in an already complicated operation.

So what’s the key?

Automated load balancing. AutoFarm^3D (our central automated 3D print farm management software) is able to load balance print jobs across your entire farm so printer use is even across the board. No favouritism is shown to the printer closest to the door.

The result is that printers last longer across the board, as no single printer is run more often than the others. It also means printers go down less frequently and more predictably, which helps you time your preventative maintenance appropriately, and ultimately helps extend machine life.

Recycle: Efficient Resource Utilization

Recycling is a trickier topic to navigate with regards to 3D printing. There are obvious things you can do, like use recycled materials, but there are few clear steps beyond that. Looking back through what we already discussed, however, reveals that there are other resources that can be recycled once their waste has been reduced.

Time

Your time is a finite resource that, once reduced via methods such as auto part ejection and workflow automation, can be recycled. Or reallocated as we would more often say.

With less running back-and-forth to the printers, and fewer student communications to manage (check out our blog on reducing admin overload if you haven’t already), your hours are freed up. If sustainability is a key focus for your print lab, perhaps these newfound hours are spent experimenting with eco-friendly filaments made from recycled materials. Or, if you find maintenance an issue, you may choose to train student volunteers on printer maintenance and have them take care of it. Maybe you even run a course in design to help minimize failures and prevent filament waste.

Regardless of how your new time is spent, recycling it to be used for more productive pursuits than admin helps take your print lab to the next level. And the fact that you have that time at all proves that your operation has a sustainable workflow.

Printers

3D printers are kind of like cars - there are some components that can be easily fixed or replaced (e.g., car battery, printer nozzle), but there comes a time when it just doesn’t work the way it used to. When a printer reaches the end of its productive life, there are still ways to make use of it for education, until it’s entirely out of commission. Thus, there are two layers of recycling printers themselves: repurposing unreliable machines, and recycling parts.

Repurposing Old Printers

If your lab has some printers that just don’t run the way they used to, they could provide a great learning opportunity for students. Using these less reliable machines to teach students how to identify root causes of common issues and conduct maintenance accordingly is one way to give them new life.

Rather than spending time trying to get these worn out machines to perform like they used to, use their inconsistency to your advantage.

Recycling Parts

Once the motherboard has gone, the printer is no longer useful for its intended purpose. But that doesn’t mean it has to go straight into the garbage.

Spare parts from the printer can be donated to the robotics club or kept for student projects. If you have students interested in building or customizing 3D printers, this is also a prime opportunity to have them experiment with replacing the motherboard or reconstructing the printer with modifications.

If worse comes to worst, there is always a guy on Facebook Marketplace looking to buy old printers for parts. If there’s no use for your lab, these leftover parts can have a new life with him.

Recycled Filament

Choosing to print with recycled materials is a great way to make your 3D print lab more sustainable. It may require a new print profile, but the quality of recycled materials these days is high enough to suit any student’s needs. We’ve actually worked with a number of 3D printing businesses who exclusively print in recycled materials - and their products look incredible.

The VAAPR print surface works well with most recycled materials, and as part of our own commitment to sustainability we print our auto ejection kits (and the packaging they come in) using recycled PLA.

Summing Up

One of 3D printing’s greatest strengths is its ability to manufacture products additively rather than subtractively - resulting in less waste. But there are still a number of pieces in the 3D printing process that aren’t as sustainable as they could be, for operators and the environment. Today we went through how the 3 R’s, reduce, reuse, and recycle, can be adapted for 3D printing, and how following their guidance while implementing automation can facilitate more sustainable 3D print lab operations.

If you’re ready to position your 3D print lab on the leading edge of sustainable operations, we’re here to help. Our 3D print farm automation solution, AutoFarm^3D helps you run your lab more sustainably by providing end-to-end automation for print farms of all sizes and applications. To learn more about AutoFarm^3D and its uses in your academic print lab, please don’t hesitate to contact us.