“The lids are not actually compostable, not without a proper incinerator. They can’t go in the garbage and be expected to break down,” she said. “They are low-quality plastics, you can’t do anything with them. Compostable plastic is not actually a great thing.”

Founded in 2011, Formlabs represents a rare prolonged success story in the world of desktop 3D printing. That’s due in no small part to the underlying stereolithography printing, which to that point, had been the domain of massive and wildly expensive industrial 3D printing.

Since then, the company has gone on to become a mainstay in the world of rapid prototyping. It has also increasingly pushed into the medical realm. In March 2020, for instance, systems were deployed to print out nasal swabs for COVID-19 testing. Dental has been an important market for the company, as well, owing to the level of customization offered by additive manufacturing.

With a plastic shredder prototype now in her Quadra Village condo, Pare is eager to take the next step, already testing which plastics work best. Plastics are categorized by number though not all are marked.

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The goal of Precious Plastic and the micro-recycling movement is to promote more local plastic recycling businesses. Pare is committed and has found there are a lot of steps between opening the website and opening a business.

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This month marks five years since the release of the Form 3, Formlabs’ last major 3D printer refresh. To celebrate the occasion, the MIT spinoff has unveiled the long-awaited Form 4. At the top of the notable features list are faster printing speeds (under two hours for most prints, per the company), a 30% build volume increase and a print resolution the company claims rivals injection molding.

“There’s a huge demand on recycled plastics from a massive industry of manufacturing but not many actual recyclers,” Pare said. “We don’t have buyers for the end product of recycling, it costs a lot to produce and most of it ends up in the garbage. We’re throwing away billions of dollars of plastic each year after a single-use.”

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“I’m already getting a lot of requests, but it’s a little ahead of what I can provide. I’ve had requests for orders of 100,000 units. It’s great there is interest and people have heard about me. Businesses want to source locally,” Pare said.

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“They’re usually a No. 6, but you have to get some of the plastics tested. These are microplastics that never get recycled so I am inspired to work with these. Otherwise, they often end up in the trash.”

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Complicating matters is that small plastics, such as bread tags, are unmarked, or can fall through bigger recycling machines.

“Fast print speeds do not compromise on dimensional accuracy or surface finish,” Formlabs says in a release. The Form 4’s print quality is nearly indistinguishable from traditional manufacturing methods, such as injection molding, making it the ultimate 3D printer to maximize productivity, move production in-house, and enable users to take more design risks.”

Fittingly, Formlabs says it was able to print 11 dental models in nine minutes and 130 dental crowns in just 20 minutes.

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Looks like Formlabs really dogfooded this one, using the Form 3 to prototype parts for its successor. The is up for pre-order today, starting at $4,499. It’s set to start shipping on May. The healthcare-focused Form 4B, meanwhile, starts at $6,299.

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One of the barriers for plastic recycling is the cost to collect it, sort it and have it cleaned. Working on a small scale means it’s easier to source clean plastics. If she can find a light industrially zoned spot, she can get a business licence and prove Flipside Plastics is a viable business by hiring staff and making sales.

Through the online community Pare tracked down a machinist in Portland, Ore., who built and shipped her a plastic shredder and a plastic injection machine (which will melt the shredded plastic into a mould) that she got last week. Now she’s on the cusp of launching an eight-month pilot project that she hopes to turn into a long-term business called Flipside Plastics.

“I’ve approached banks, micro-lenders, and applied for grants,” Pare said. “The biggest challenge is finding light industrially zoned space, 500 square feet, that can accommodate the trial.”

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Laska Pare came to B.C. three years ago after a stint in Africa. It was there she witnessed the effects of single-use plastic and the pollution that is fast accumulating around the world.

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With that in mind she found a micro-plastics movement online called Precious Plastic, an open-source sharer of technologies for small-scale plastic recycling.

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The system is powered by a new print engine that uses a tech called LFD (Low Force Display) to cure the parts at higher speeds. That’s coupled with an increased build area, which allows users to print more small parts simultaneously.

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There’s also No. 7 plastic, a low-grade type of plastic that has become increasingly popular and which encompasses “compostable” coffee cup lids, often made of corn starch.