From Plastic Packaging Waste to 3D-Printed Products
The cleaned plastic packaging waste is mixed, melted, and extruded in a compounder at Fraunhofer IFAM. (Photo: Fraunhofer IFAM)
March 31, 2025 – The amount of plastic waste is increasing and has approximately tripled in Germany over the past 30 years. Packaging waste, in particular, is a major contributor to this. While German households produced 2.1 million tons of plastic waste in 1994, this had increased to 5.6 million by 2023. This makes it even more important to find ways to recycle these disposable products, most of which are based on crude oil.
In collaboration with Hochschule Bremen (City University of Applied Sciences) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology and Advanced Materials (IFAM), they aim to convert this waste into high-quality 3D-printed products. Because the waste is to be recycled for use in 3D printing, it must meet very high standards in terms of purity, shape, and size, for example. To achieve this, an advanced sorting technique was used. To ensure sufficient purity, the output from the sorting plant was further processed. It was successively ground, washed, and freed from unwanted materials using float-sink separation. The team used near-infrared technology to identify any remaining foreign particles. The researchers then ground the material again to the required grain size and dried it. This method achieved a purity of more than 99.8 percent, with properties suitable for the 3D printer.
