Reply To: 3D printing and the enviroment #teamseas

[blinky465 17028xp 2]

An LCD display with say 1000-hours in it isn’t going to last that long before having to be replaced

I’ve an Anycubic Photon and am still on the original screen, after almost two years. I’m not sure that I’m anywhere near the 1,000 hour mark. And I consider myself to have printed “a lot” of minis (enough that I gave a 2ft cube box of minis away to a local gaming cafe a few months ago and still have more minis in the “to do” pile than on my “done” shelves).

A single “print run” produces on average eight minis and takes about four hours (there or there abouts). So at 1,000 hours, I’d have printed about 2,000 miniatures. Irrespective of how long that takes, that’s  hell of a lot of minis! I’m a single-user, not a miniature-printing factory; 1,000 hours is going to keep me going for years!

I think the problem with LCDs on 3d printers is that many have been broken through misuse, rather than burning out through over exposure to UV light (so few ever get anywhere near the 1,000 hour mark). This isn’t the fault of the machine, or the technology, but ignorance of the user. If users learned to look after their screens, they’d last longer (in the same way, if everyone driving a car crashed one and disposed of it once a week, we’d say the problem is with the drivers, not the cars).

So – at the risk of upsetting a few people – replacing a 5″ screen every two years or more *compared to some of the other disposal issues we have as a society* I’m not going to lose much sleep over it. It’ll have lasted longer than the kettle I bought from a supermaket last year which is already failing, for example.

Of far more concern – environmentally – is boxes and sprues (which, by weight, make up about two-thirds of the weight of plastic in a box of minis, which is then thrown away). If we’re going to get so critical that *zero* waste is the target (rather than aiming to reduce it) we should all go back to lead pewter miniatures (though we’ll never hear the end of it from @avernos who will insist he was right all along).

For me, 3d printing is far more ecologically sound than buying boxes and boxes of “plastic crack”. I’ve *reduced* my waste by stopping buying plastic minis. The “product” goes from creator (digital 3d artist) to the consumer (me, printing minis) without the need for power-hungry factories to make the minis, “exploited workers” (as tankkommander referred to), packaging, shipping, warehousing, onward delivery from the retailer (with its own additional packaging). By weight, I dispose of about 35% of the resin I print (throwing away the “scaffold” support structures) and maybe an LCD screen every two? three? years. It’s not zero-waste. But it’s multiple degrees better – environmentally – than buying retail minis.

Save the planet – get a 3d printer 😉