EUBCE 2026 - Nasim Zaman PIYAS - Performance Assessment of Bioplastic and Recycled PET Materials in Additive Manufacturing: Toward Sustainable Eco-Manufacturing

Performance Assessment of Bioplastic and Recycled PET Materials in Additive Manufacturing: Toward Sustainable Eco-Manufacturing

Short Introductive summary

Additive manufacturing’s main goals are to reduce plastic waste and make materials more circular. We show a purely mechanical way to turn PET and PET-G production waste from consumers into FDM filaments and test how well they work for functional printing without giving specific parameter values. Waste items are processed, cleaned, reduced, and optionally combined before being extruded into filaments that may be used with regular printers. Under normal settings, standard specimens and representative geometries are printed and then tested using standard test methodologies and printability standards. The recycled PET-G (rPET-G) keeps the same level of quality as virgin PET-G, such as consistent filament feeding, smooth extrusion, regular bead creation, and cohesive failure modes that show good interlayer bonding. The dimensional outputs follow the digital model within the tolerances that are common on desktops, and the surface polish is like that of new material. Compared to other biobased materials, rPET-G has a better balance between rigidity and ductility than brittle materials. It also has a wider processing window that makes setup easier. These observations demonstrate that rPET-

N.Z. Piyas, University of Alberta, Edmonton, CANADA
R. Monroy, University of Alberta, Edmonton, CANADA
R. Ahmad, University of Alberta, Edmonton, CANADA