• kozy138@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    As someone who does R&D testing on plastics that are used in medical devices, I have some insight. Of course the type of plastic matters, but all plastics use carcinogenic chemicals during the manufacturing/extrusion process.

    To make most plastic, a polymer resin is mixed with additives such as solvents, plasticizers, and stabilizers at high temperatures. Ideally, you want the additives to evaporate out during production so that you’re left with just the newly formed plastic.

    But some of these additives get trapped in tiny air pockets between polymer chains. When they’re reheated, the polymer chains relax and release the volatile, carcinogenic additives into the air.

    This is likely where the toxicity is coming from, not the polymer chain itself. So regardless of the type of plastic used, reheating the polymer during 3D printing will release some volatile additives.

  • veee@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    tl;dr maybe don’t sleep where you print

    Does this mean that 3D printing causes cancer? No, not by a long shot. But, it’s clear that under lab conditions, exposure to either PLA or ABS particulates seems to be related to some of the cell changes associated with carcinogenesis.

  • Nighed
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    2 months ago

    There was that video from a few months ago from… Prints with layers I think? That looked at the actual particulate and volatile counts and found that PLA actually gave off very little? Other plastics were much worse.

    So remember that the particle counts matter as much as the danger of the particles.

    (Disclaimer, that was a video, not a peer reviewed scientific paper)

    • scutiger@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      There was also a video a while back from one maker channel where the guy said that he got some type of nasty poisoning from breathing in fumes from ABS printing. Fortunately ABS isn’t as popular of a material as it once was, now that there are better alternatives, but I’m sure many of them still put out some nasty fumes.

  • utopiah@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Printing using PLA in the basement, with a filter, not being in the room until the print is actually done. I feel pretty safe.

  • elucubra@sopuli.xyz
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    2 months ago

    What does this all mean to the home gamer?

    Oooook……

    Plot twist!

    This took an interesting turn!

  • Wow who would have thunk the chemicals getting dumped into the environment by the fucking oil industries could be dangerouse. There are a million 3d printing materials u can use and have decent extraction and ur fine. Guy u need to be scared 3d printers might give the consumer too much power, cant have foss technology winning out.