3D Brooklyn Releases New Recycled Filament Made from Potato Chip Bags
TerraCycle Include USA
Potato chips are a guilty pleasure for a lot of people. I hardly ever buy them, in keeping with my philosophy of “if you eat healthy at home, you can eat terribly elsewhere.” I tend to attack them at parties, though. No matter how frequently you buy or eat them, potato chips are everywhere, along with their weird, shiny, crinkly packaging. Is it plastic? Is it foil? It is plastic, but it’s an odd hybrid of polypropylene and polyethylene that makes up those metallic pouches capable of blinding you if the sun hits them a certain way. Unlike most plastics, potato chip bags’ blended plastic properties make them unfit for recycling – that’s a lot of greasy shiny material going to the landfills.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of disposable products that are unfit for recycling, and that’s why companies like TerraCycleexist. The New Jersey company collects nonrecyclable or hard to recycle waste and figures out ways to recycle or repurpose it. They were the first resource that came to mind for Will Haude, founder of 3D Brooklyn, when he began to feel bothered by the amount of plastic waste his company generated. He wondered why his company, which manufactures custom 3D printed items from electronic accessories to planters, couldn’t start reducing rather than generating plastic waste.