24 Jul “Print Your City”: can we print street forniture with 3D technologies?

It’s summer: outside it is really hot, and while you are enjoying walking as a tourist in the centre of Amsterdam, you sit on a bench to rest a little. If you look better, you can notice you are not relaxing on one of the usual structure made of wood or metal, but on something different instead. You are sitting on XXX, the first prototype of a 3D printed bench, made of recycled plastic waste.

The capital of the Netherlands is the first place where this kind of ecological bench is under experiment: in this way, it is possible to renew already used plastic and also to remember to Dutch citizens (and to all the tourists) the importance of recycling. The funniest part? All happens while they are relaxing.

The name of the bench, certainly curious given the reputation of Amsterdam, is not linked to adult-oriented contents, but it has a whole different meaning. XXX, the symbol for unknown, ironically stands for whoever donated the prime materials for building the bench: so, everyone who separate their waste and support recycling. In fact, the same amount of plastic waste produced by two random citizens in a year of Amsterdam was used to print the bench.

XXX was built in the context of Print Your City, a project promoted by The New Raw (a Dutch design agency) which aims to transform plastic waste of our cities into public space with 3D printing on a large scale. The creators of the project are convinced that 3D printing allows shortening the lifecycle of plastic and the recycling path; moreover, it can combine modular repair, reducing wastes even more. Given the numbers of plastic pollution, we are sure this is a good starting point.

Felfil supports the ideas promoted by Print Your City: if you are passionate about 3D printing, don’t throw your wrong prints, but instead give a second life to them, generating new filament using Felfil Evo extruder machine.

(Main picture: https://printyour.city/)