7/21/2026 at 4:53:48 AM
So the author recycled 10 pounds of plastic, but used 8.5 pounds of glue to do so (184 sticks at 0.74 oz which seems to be average for glue sticks).Cool project, but that ratio seems very ineffective. Especially since there is a realistic chance this ends up in landfill within some decades anyway.
by esquire_900
7/21/2026 at 8:56:06 AM
Like those "wood" tables that are 50% made of epoxy. It grinds my gearsby lopis
7/21/2026 at 9:25:01 AM
I'm so glad that fad is over. My mother worked as a theatre artisan before retirement and it was, among other things, fumes from curing epoxy that caused numerous health issues down the line.by Tade0
7/21/2026 at 12:55:50 PM
I am curious about the down-the-line effects of fumes from printing PLA and PETG. Reddit posts suggest no ill effects, but it hasn’t been long enough in the hobbyist world.by xattt
7/21/2026 at 4:19:36 PM
My printer is near a window so I just added an exhaust duct to the window, in the past when it wasn't close to a window I ran that duct through some filters (charcoal, furnace filter stuff) and left the end near an additional air purifier i had in the space.by sleepybrett
7/21/2026 at 7:02:56 AM
Most of the environmental cost of plastic happens when it’s made. Once it exists, burying it in landfill isn’t nearly as bad as many people think.95+% of the carbon footprint of plastics comes from production and manufacturing.
by fhub
7/21/2026 at 7:39:36 AM
Isn’t plastic nearly free as a raw material as a by product of fossil fuel production? I was always told it’s the opposite, plastic bags are better for the environment if disposed of properly because they’re so light weight to transport, didn’t need to be farmed, and companies basically give away the raw material because it would be more expensive to dispose of. A cotton bag needs to be reused upwards 1000x to be less impactful, or was I bamboozled?by repeekad
7/21/2026 at 9:28:24 AM
We now know that, contrary to the cotton bag, they turn into microplastics which cost way more to remove from the environment than that reusable bag.by Tade0
7/21/2026 at 10:00:57 AM
Not when they are properly used as a fossil fuel source. As a fossil fuel source that just happened to also make itself useful in other ways on the voyage from mine to smokestack. As long as we still burn coal for electricity and/or heat it's just stupid to bury plastics (or, worse, let it slowly decay unburied)by usrusr
7/21/2026 at 10:33:47 AM
It wouldn’t be so bad if you buried it and it stayed buried it, but whatever disposal technology you use it doesn’t work if the plastic is never properly disposed of. Even if people are really careful, for instance, some single use plastics are going to blow away in the wind. Something shoddily made in the bottom of a pond is going to come apart and shed plastics, etc.by PaulHoule
7/21/2026 at 8:09:39 AM
> Isn’t plastic nearly free as a raw material as a by product of fossil fuel production?Yes and no. Oil is cracked down for lots of different things, but one of the things that people are really aiming for is ethane which can be used to make industrial ethanol, and a lot of plastics.
What you end up with to get there is lots of propane and butane, which is used as a fuel gas, but most of that ends up going up the flare stack because there's so much of it. We won't stop doing this while we still use plastics and fertiliser.
You need very clean propane or butane for things like cooking stoves, but you can run car engines on it just fine because they're so much less picky, and the exhaust gases are far cleaner than engines run on heavier fractions like oh maybe octane. This is why things like warehouse forklifts run on gas instead of diesel or petrol - you don't die if you breathe in the fumes, because there's no unburnt fuel or carbon monoxide, because it runs as lean as a vegan's dog.
by ErroneousBosh
7/21/2026 at 12:14:32 PM
>What you end up with to get there is lots of propane and butane, which is used as a fuel gas, but most of that ends up going up the flare stack because there's so much of it. We won't stop doing this while we still use plastics and fertiliser.The amount of gas flared globally adds up to little over 1% of global energy production. I know that doesn't sound like much but we're talking like terawatts. It truly is a mind boggling amount of energy that gets wasted because we simply can't get it to users cheap enough.
by cucumber3732842
7/21/2026 at 5:15:00 PM
If only all (or almost all) of it was flared! Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, and unfortunately there is still a lot of it escaping from oil installations unflared (https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/potential-emi...).by rob74
7/21/2026 at 10:14:15 PM
It's a pain in the arse to run vehicles on methane (CNG) because it has to be stored at around 250 bar (or, 3600psi in Old People Units), and it's really not very energy-dense so you need a lot of it.Again though flaring it off in a gas turbine to generate electricity and heat would be ultimately less harmful than just letting it out into the air.
By contrast the tank in an LPG vehicle is at around 8 bar, not a hell of a lot more than the pressure in a truck's tyres. On my old Range Rover the LPG tank is considerably less spicy than the air suspension tank at 15 bar, which is getting into "this can injure you" territory.
by ErroneousBosh
7/21/2026 at 1:06:15 PM
> because we simply can't get it to users cheap enough.Or we can't get it clean enough to use as say cooking gas or aerosol propellant.
Stick it in cars, they'll burn any old shite and emit water and carbon dioxide - two terrible greenhouse gases, for sure, but you'll extract useful work from it instead of literally just heating the atmosphere for the fun of it.
by ErroneousBosh
7/21/2026 at 10:00:46 AM
It also burns quite well. If are in a location that burns trash in waste-to-energy plants you can get a decent amount of that energy back by throwing it awayby wongarsu
7/21/2026 at 11:46:50 AM
"burying it in landfill isn’t nearly as bad as many people think."I think you're full of shit.
by SirFatty
7/21/2026 at 5:43:18 PM
What does that have to do with anything? The point is to do something cool with it.It far more effective than building a collage with bought or new printed parts
by s1artibartfast
7/21/2026 at 4:56:54 AM
Honestly wtf does the glue matter when people are going through plastic like it's nothing? Bringing up the glue is such a weird nitpick.by chneu
7/21/2026 at 5:32:12 AM
When the ratio is almost 1:1 it is a bit more than a nit.by ofrzeta
7/21/2026 at 5:33:09 AM
Do nothing: 10 pounds of filament poop has go to the landfill.Do this thing: 10 pounds of filament poop still exists, + 8 pounds of glue sticks (which is basically a thermoplastic) used, to create something that's eventually going to end up in a landfill.
Are you being deliberately obtuse?
Recycling or reuse is not as useful as just not creating waste in the first place.
by isoprophlex
7/21/2026 at 6:37:26 AM
Maybe it looks more amazing in person than in pictures. If not, and the point is a message about waste, then the 80% increase could be cast as part of the message.Let’s say every month the artist repurposes the last pile of plastic with more glue. At the end of one year, the 10lbs would turn into 1100lbs. At the end of two years the original 10lbs would have turned into 1.3 million lbs of plastic waste. Surely that would frame a very powerful message about plastic waste and green washing misleading public policy.
by rz2k
7/21/2026 at 6:31:07 PM
Or do something entirely different and 100lbs go to the landfill.Reuse is good if the activity replaces something that would generate more waste. This is the real benchmark, not the case where someone does nothing.
The most efficient thing is always to do nothing and/or kill oneself. This isnt practical, so reusing used materials instead of new when you do something is still net good.
by s1artibartfast
7/21/2026 at 5:35:46 AM
So... don't 3D print anything?by sudo_cowsay
7/21/2026 at 6:58:40 AM
Reduce, reuse, recycle.by tonyedgecombe
7/21/2026 at 5:33:21 AM
hot glue is a petrochemical just like plastic.by staplor
7/21/2026 at 2:32:47 PM
They do make biodegradable hot glue [1] but it's still not perfect. It's biodegradable and certified compostable under industrial conditions but it still has a polymer base. It's also not ideal for projects that are always in UV light.by smith7018
7/21/2026 at 5:34:48 AM
It is plastic, nothing else.by ofrzeta
7/21/2026 at 4:23:41 PM
Why use glue at all, he should have done this using a 'stained glass' method. Build some kind of a frame for each area of color and then melt the filimant into it.by sleepybrett