20 Dec Lancashire 3D and Felfil Evo team up for a “zero-waste” circular economy

The English company Lancashire 3D will use Felfil Evo as a key component in recycling 3D printing waste.

For those who had never heard of it, Lancashire 3D is one of Europe’s largest online printing services. They strongly support sustainability with their behavior: the company’s goal is to build a “zero-waste” circular economy, in which plastic materials can be recycled and reinserted into the production cycle.

The company already recycles 95% of internal plastic production. Steven Pearson, one of the founders, contacted us to go a step further: in addition to doing their part for the environment by reducing the amount of waste they produce, Lancashire 3D will be reclaiming plastic wastes from the end user’s printing activities to turn it into new, printable filament.

Here Felfil Evo comes into play: the company will use our extruder to transform all the collected plastic waste into new filament, which can be used once again by 3D printers. After being crushed into small parts, the plastic waste can be inserted into the Felfil Evo tank; at this point, in the melting chamber the plastic is heated and finally pushed by a screw through the nozzle, from which it comes out as filament. Thanks to Felfil Spooler, the new filament is automatically wrapped in spools, allowing to speed up the operations and therefore to work with higher quantities of material.

“We know that the planet has a finite amount of resources and that we all need to take more responsibility“, told us Steven, “Governments are making plans to take action, consumers are vowing to change their behaviour, and businesses like ours are stepping up to help. By creating a circular economy (production), which means that when finished with, 3D printing material returns for recycling and is changed back to printable material and reused, waste is seen as a resource and part of a continuous cycle”.

The goal of the Lancashire 3D’s project is to reclaim from their users about 165 kg of waste material each year, which will be transformed into reusable filament using Felfil Evo. It might seem a small quantity compared to the tons of waste produced by 3D printing in the world, but it is an important message, which we hope will be received and followed by other companies. After all, we created Felfil Evo with the goal of reducing the environmental impact of 3D printing, and we are happy that other companies also believe in our project and share our values.

If you want to learn more about the potential of Felfil Evo, contact us: we are happy to answer all your questions!