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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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With the amount of open bed, cheaper printers, a lot. Keeping them inside does not prevent them from entering the environment. As well we need to breath to start with, so airflow will take it outside. Add vacuum cleaning and waste disposal. Unless the plastics are trapped and melted into larger clumps. They get into the environment. This is why they are so dangerous.
Even with enclosed printers. Unless very well filtered and some plan for disposal of that filter that prevents this. It's just an extra delay.
Some plastic types are better than others. And I honestly think development of thermo plastic replacements is better than stopping 3d printing.
there are some PLA derivatives designed to compost quickly, PLA itself will probably compost faster than most other plastics, not that that's a very high bar