TRASH HACKERS COLLECTIVE
“Trash Hackers Collective is focused on exploring new and innovative ways to work with discarded plastic.
Our mission is to empower the capabilities of the community to work with plastics that do not have local recycling options and would otherwise be buried in the landfill. My primary focus has been on developing the equipment, techniques, and documenting the processes and safety protocols necessary to create new things out of these plastic resources. More info can be found at TrashHackers.org
Trash Hackers Collective is an ad-hoc group of artists, technologists, engineers, designers, educators, and learners all interested in demystifying and understanding plastic recycling. We bring our diverse skills and perspectives to gain insights into the opportunities, challenges, and surprises as we all attempt hands-on plastic recycling. We hope that communicating our lessons from local-scaled plastic recycling can help others better understand this issue.”
The Trashprinter is a large format 3D printer that prints directly with shredded waste plastic. It reduces the dependency on expensive filament and utilizes waste plastic that would otherwise be thrown into the landfill. The Trashprinter was originally designed by Sam Smith, creator of the Metabolizer project. In early 2018 Darcy Neal helped Sam to get the early prototype of the Trashprinter printhead up and running by helping build and program an MPCNC designed by V1engineering. Over the course of several years, Sam has developed various prototypes of the Trashprinter and has worked up to V4 of the Trashprinter printhead, and Darcy Neal is now back at it experimenting with the V4 design to help dial in the settings, automate some cool features, and see how fast and big we can get it to print. Here you can see a series of the experiments that took place during the ongoing testing and calibration of the Trash Hackers Trashprinter.
This is an ongoing project with a long list of ideas that are being worked through.
Some points of interest are:
-Developing a custom set of GCODE commands for various print processes.
-Automating the documentation of prints in real-time so that print settings and video footage is collected every time a print is run.
-Dialing in temperature profiles, feeds, and speeds to get maximum efficiency for the fastest printing.
-Printing a collection of useful objects for community use.
-Printing a series of sculptural objects in the pursuit of a low-impact artform that repurposes waste materials vs. producing waste normally seen in the process of creating sculpture. (more to come)
