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Recycling

I want to recycle my failed prints and other stuff to save the world. You can’t,

The recycling where someone picks up your recyclable stuff and carts it off. It all ends up at a huge center. A pile of not quite trash. Pic out the iron stuff with magnets and send that off to be remelted and born anew. People pick out the aluminum cans, they are valuable, and they are sent off to be melted and reborn. Paper, cardboard, etc. is taken out and sent off. Whoever gets it adds water, turns it to pulp, and makes new stuff, not good stuff like sheets of paper, but worse stuff like cardboard.

Now most of what you have left is plastic. A lot of plastic things are made of multiple types of plastic, shampoo bottles are often one plastic with an different one around them, and there is no way to recycle them, so burn them for energy ot send them off to the landfill, a lovely word for what used to be a garbage dump.

Now, all the commercial plastic has a recycling symbol. Just cause it has the symbol does not mean it is recycled. Some plastics are worth so little that it makes sense to burn them. There are few things you can do with used plastic. Even if there is a use it may be so small that they have far too much waste. For example used plastic bags can be turned into benches, but there are FAR more used plastic bags than can be used in benches people will accept. The huge availability and limited use makes a lot of plastic worth less than the cost of recycling it, so it is burned. A few lucky plastics may be desirable and in such shotr supply, that it is worth it to recycle them. These go down as the cost of people to seperate them out goes up. If some future robots will do it, but they probably will cost too much.

Now you have your plastic with whatever trash ended up there too. Your plastic has no recycling symbol, so they have no idea if it is PLA or ABS. Nothing to do but burn it all.

You can, but probably will not try or be able to, find someplace that will take your waste. You have to sort the PLA from ABS. The site has to trust you. They can probably not turn it back into filament, how would you feel if your spool of PLA had an ABS chunk in the middle? There are not a lot of uses for probably PLA but maybe a little ABS.

Rant. The whole recycling thing was invented by industry to make you feel bad for using the plastic bottle industry made. The put the recycling symbol on a lot of stuff. You are a good person and keep that stuff out of the trash. The recycle center takes the valuable/easy stuff out and almost all of the stuff you separated and washed ends up the same place as all the other trash.