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3D Printing Goes Green

University of Washington leads the way for environmentally minded additive manufacturing.

By Cassandra Callan November 28, 2012 Published in the December 2012 issue of Seattle Met

What’s for dinner? Upload “steak,” press print, voila: 24-ounce rib eye. Or maybe you need a liver transplant? That’s on its way, too. The business of 3D printing, manufacturers predict, will be the next trillion-dollar industry. It’s known more formally as “additive manufacturing,” or layering materials to form a structure, and there seems to be very little limit to what that structure can be. At the University of Washington, the student-run Washington Open Object Fabricators club—or WOOF—printed a boat made out of melted plastic milk jugs this past July. And it floats. The club also helped the engineering majors win first place—and $100,000—in the 3D4D Challenge in London in October for their proposal to turn wasted plastics into raw materials for latrines and water-collection components. Teaming up with local nonprofit Water for Humans, WOOF will manufacture these items on their large-scale 3D printer. WOOF president Matt Rogge says he hopes 3D printing will become a humanitarian industry, reducing waste and improving sanitation around the world—and maybe, just maybe, amending the environmental mantra to read: reduce, reuse, recycle, reprint.

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