Interestingly, the supports could even dissolve in the main liquid ingredient of the original resin, like a cube of ice in water. This means that the material used to print structural supports could be continuously recycled: Once a printed structure’s supporting material dissolves, that mixture can be blended directly back into fresh resin and used to print the next set of parts — along with their dissolvable supports.
Unless I’m reading this too optimistically, it seems like recovering the resin just requires adding more of the original solvent, which sounds pretty good (as long as that solvent isn’t much nastier than a regular resin solvent).
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 days ago
As always with plastic recycling. The whole concept of plastic recycling is only a “don’t think about it, just buy it”.