Tag: Circular Economy

London Borough of Hackney has high hopes for 3D printing technology in circular economy push

The London Borough of Hackney recently awarded £600,000 in grants via its Hackney Central Impact and Ideas Grant Fund, supporting local businesses pushing the circular economy.

The program involved a total of 23 green enterprises, including Batch.Works, an East London design and manufacturing studio using 3D printing to upcycle plastic waste into useful products. Riding off the back of the initiative, the Hackney Council is now actively encouraging other local businesses to partake in discussions regarding the circular economy, all in a bid to cut waste, reuse materials, and slash emissions.

Guy Nicholson, Deputy Mayor for Delivery, Inclusive Economy, and Regeneration, said, “It is all too easy to jettison some of our ambitions to reduce emissions, support the creation of a circular economy and play our collective part in transforming Hackney’s local economy and placing it at the forefront of the net zero carbon economy of tomorrow. Despite the challenges we face, the Council is determined to support the borough’s business owners to create the economy of tomorrow.”

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Ford and HP reuse spent 3D printed powders and parts

Ford Desktop Metal

Ford teamed up with HP to reuse spent 3D printed powders and parts, thus closing a supply chain loop and turning them into injection-molded vehicle parts. The recycled materials are being used to manufacture injection-molded fuel-line clips installed first on Super Duty F-250 trucks.  The parts have better chemical and moisture resistance than conventional versions, are 7% lighter and cost 10% less. The Ford research team has identified 10 other fuel-line clips on existing vehicles that could benefit from this innovative use of material and are migrating it to future models.

Sustainability is a priority for both companies, which, through joint exploration, led to this unlikely, earth-friendly solution. The resulting injection-molded parts are better for the environment with no compromise in the durability and quality standards Ford and its customers demand.

“Finding new ways to work with sustainable materials, reducing waste and leading the development of the circular economy are passions at Ford,” said Debbie Mielewski, Ford technical fellow, Sustainability.

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The advantages of 3D printing are still far from circular

3D printing has been around for three decades, but only in the last few years has the technology become a serious contender for displacing conventional manufacturing methods now that it can achieve material strength that rivals legacy offerings and can deliver parts in a fraction of the time. As these capabilities mature, hopes have soared for 3D printing’s potential to reduce the environmental footprint of multiple products and processes, and even for it to contribute to an increasingly circular economy. But how close are we to such a reality?

3D printed hand

3D printing is a process of making three-dimensional, solid objects from a digital file. With additive manufacturing — the formal name for 3D printing — a printer adds successive layers of material only where needed, layer upon layer, until the three-dimensional object is created. Research firm Statista estimates that the 3D printing market will reach $26.2 billion in value by 2022, factoring in revenue not just from sales of printers and materials, but also from software and related services.

Currently, the process can reduce materials use, waste, energy consumption and transportation emissions under some circumstances. “There are cases where additive manufacturing is best, and some where it’s not,” said Lou Rassey, CEO of additive manufacturing company Fast Radius.

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3D printing and the circular economy

The circular economy (CE) aims to radically improve resource efficiency by eliminating the concept of waste and leading to a shift away from the linear take-make-waste model. In a CE, resources are flowing in a circular manner either in a biocycle (biomass) or technocycle (inorganic materials). While early studies indicate that 3D printing (3DP) holds substantial promise for sustainability and the creation of a CE, there is no guarantee that it will do so. There is great uncertainty regarding whether the current trajectory of 3DP adoption is creating more circular material flows or if it is leading to an alternative scenario in which less eco-efficient localised production, demands for customised goods, and a higher rate of product obsolescence combine to bring about increased resource consumption. It is critical that CE principles are embedded into the new manufacturing system before the adoption of 3DP reaches a critical inflection point in which negative practices become entrenched. This paper, authored by both academic and industry experts, proposes a research agenda to determine enablers and barriers for 3DP to achieve a CE. We explore the two following overarching questions to discover what specific issues they entail: (1) How can a more distributed manufacturing system based on 3DP create a circular economy of closed-loop material flows? (2) What are the barriers to a circular 3D printing economy? We specifically examine six areas—design, supply chains, information flows, entrepreneurship, business models and education—with the aim of formulating a research agenda to enable 3DP to reach its full potential for a CE.

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