Question: How do you think the 3D printer will benefit us and what has it got to do with the environment?

Edward Taylor answered on 11 Mar 2013:

I think you will really benefit from understanding the principles of 3D printing, because this will help you to better understand the direction that manufacturing is going in in the future. When I was 11 I was introduced to the internet at school, which was pretty new back then! Getting an understanding of it early helped to prepare me for an economy built almost entirely on the internet now, with some of the biggest companies like google and facebook on there.

So what do 3D printers have to do with the environment? well with current manufacturing methods, there are a few factors that 3D printers fix. Firstly current manufacturing processes require a lot of heat, a lot of power and produce a lot of waste. They also require everything to be made in large batches of hundreds, and if no one wants them then they just get thrown away, meaning even more waste! Also a lot of manufacturing happens far away (like in china!) which means it all needs to be shipped around the world on big fuel hungry container ships.

3D printers firstly don’t produce any waste when making objects, as they only fuse together the amount of powder required to make the object. When you are done with the object you can send it away to be reduced back into powder, so 3D printing produces recyclable objects. The objects will be made there and then in your house so no need to ship anything around the world! And the process of creating a 3D model is pretty energy efficient. For all these reasons 3D printers will bring about huge benefits for the environment.