Roadmap to sustainable plastic additive manufacturing

Abstract

As additive manufacturing (AM) is heading towards mass production and mass customization, the process needs to be environment-friendly and energy-efficient in order to be self-sustainable. Selective laser sintering (SLS) and fused deposition modeling (FDM) are two processes contributing massively towards plastic additive manufacturing. In SLS, the powders that do not contribute to the mass of products become unusable (after some number of reuse) and finally turn into waste. As high energy is required for production of powders, generation of these wastes impacts environment sustainability. A contrivance needs to be developed to convert these waste powders into high-value products to make the process sustainable. FDM has the largest market share in terms of number of AM systems sold and is the most popular for fabricating low-value products. Its usefulness will be further expanded if inexpensive high-value products could be made through this process. In the present work, waste SLS powder is employed to prepare feedstock for inexpensive high-value FDM products, which demonstrates that SLS refuse could be utilized for mass production of FDM feedstock. If two processes (SLS & FDM) will be connected as proposed here, it will make plastic additive manufacturing energy-efficient, self-sustainable, and will contribute to environment sustainability, in general.