Ok, to preface this I am in no way intending to start any drama or step on toes. This is just something that's been gnawing at the back of my head for a while and I'd like to hear other people's thoughts on this same issue.

I've been printing now for about four years and I realized recently that I haven't actually printed that much actual stuff.

In thinking about it, I see a lot of plastic stuff being printed. I don't want to sit here and make judgement calls about what's "necessary" versus not but I am seeing a number of people doing things like iterative prototyping where they run off five or ten prints that all end up trashed or someone doing an art print that they then scrap and re-print because there's a surface irregularity that could be corrected with post processing but they'd rather just re-print the item.

I see a lot of useful prints and tools but part of me can't help but think that I could buy the same thing for a few bucks that would last me much longer.

Broken and failed prints mean a lot of plastic and, to the best of my knowledge, there really isn't a good way to recycle most of this plastic or to break it down such that it isn't stuck as microplastics for the next thousand years.

I feel like there's...maybe less attention or care given to the fact that a lot of this plastic doesn't go away. I'm not saying 3D printing should be stopped and I don't want to minimize the great work done by members of the community with respect to addressing that very topic. But I think overall I see a lot of plastic stuff getting produced that ultimately gets thrown away.

I've tried to be very strict with my printing in the sense that I don't print something unless I need it and there's no reasonable other way to get the thing I need and I try to be precise with my printing to minimize failed prints or having to punch out a bunch of prototypes that don't get used.

I know you can kind of recycle things like PLA in the sense that you can melt it down and pour it into molds and I have melted down a lot of my old prints into PLA bricks but I haven't really found a use for this myself.

I'm interested to hear anyone else's thoughts on 3D printing increasing the proliferation of plastic.