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its kind. Its design was not dreamed up in a toy company's marketing or design
department. Instead, its design was based on a video game avatar.
The 3D printed toy is brightly colored. Like the video game avatar that
inspired it, the printed toy boasts an elaborately folded cape that ripples over
its back and shoulders. The printed toy started life not as a bunch of nurdles,
but as a pile of plastic powder. Eventually, it came to “life” when a customer
placed an order on the company's website, uploaded her game avatar, and
punched in her credit car number.
When the toy company received the order, company engineers adapted
and adjusted the uploaded digital ile into a printable design ile. Much of the
formatting process was automated since the avatar already existed in digital
form. Finally, the customer approved the inal design ile and a small print
shop nearby manufactured it.
At this point in the story, the 3D printed toy would describe its irst human,
a print shop employee who pulled it out of its print bed. This technologically-
skilled midwife dusted off the toy's excess powder and buffed and polished it to
perfection. Finally, another print shop employee placed the completed toy into
a small box and FedExed it to the customer's front door.
Which of these two plastic toys has the greener product lifecycle? At irst
glance, it seems the 3D printed toy is more eco-friendly. It was made in a clean,
regulated print shop in a developed nation where working conditions are good,
safety standards are met and labor regulations followed. Shipping one small
FedEx box leaves a smaller carbon footprint than than shipping hundreds of
massive cartons. The 3D printed toy never saw the inside of a factory injection
molding machine or travelled around the world in a carbon spewing network
of shipping containers, trucks and planes. Its storefront was a simple web site
that didn't need to be heated or lit.
At irst glance, it's tempting to heap eco-savior status onto the 3D printing
process. But consider the fact that both toys were made of non-biodegradable
plastic. Per pound of manufactured product, a 3D printer consumes more than
10 times as much electricity as an injection molding machine. 2 Despite its bad
reputation, an injection molding machine is actually very clean and frugal,
leaving behind little waste byproduct as it pushes plastic pellets into shape.
Finally, a distribution network built on large numbers of small shipments to
different locations isn't ecologically eficient. All of this adds up to the fact that
if 3D printed manufacturing were merely scaled up to global proportions, there
would be nothing green about it.
 
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