- Project Seafood
- Washed ashore plastic waste is transformed into new 3D printed objects
- Team equipped with plastics shredder, filament extruder and 3D printer
Project Seafood is an adventurous attempt of Fabian Wyss and Jennifer Gadient from Switzerland to explore the possibilities of recycling washed ashore plastic waste into new 3D printed objects while travelling. Equipped with a plastics shredder, Noztek filament extruder and desktop FFF 3D printer, the couple drove their mobile recycling fablab along the Mediterranean coastline of Spain all the way down to Morocco to collect household plastic waste beachside and transform it into 3D printed objects.
The two mainly focus on transforming HDPE waste in form of bottle caps, wash them, shred them, extrude the handmade granule into filament with a slightly modified Noztek extruder and then feed the 100% recycled plastic string into their 3D printer. Having had an idea of feasibility but no proof of concept the time they left Switzerland, Fabian and Jennifer had to tweak, tune and experiment quite a bit while being on the road to be able to create a more or less reproducible workflow and object quality. Yet they need to put a lot of manual work and aid into the comparably slow processes and thus at the time only produce very small editions of sea and surf related artifacts.
After half a year of living, developing and creating on campsites or remote beaches, the two are happy that despite minor scratches all their machines survived the heavy environment astonishingly well.
The progress of the project can be seen at their website: www.projectseafood.com
