This awesome machine turns PET bottles into 3D printer filament, and you can fund it right now

It’s always a great idea to recycle your plastic bottles, but how about using them for your own needs? If you go through PET bottles like crazy and your recycling heap is a mountain of plastic, you may be interested in this cool project that can turn them into 3D printer filament. And while it’s still at the crowdfunding stage, it’s already shaping up to be something amazing.

The PETFusion 2.0 can turn your soda bottles into 3D printing materials

This cool project is called “PETFusion 2.0” and comes to us via Creative3DP. It’s a pretty ingenious device: you give it a dry, clean PET bottle, and it will slowly unravel it into a thin strip. This strip is then fed through a colorizer before it’s turned into a colored filament you can use in your next 3D print.

As you can tell by the name, this isn’t the first PETFusion to hit the market; Creative3DP claims that this improved version makes the process faster and easier. It also comes with some interesting new additions:

This upgraded version integrates multiple cutting-edge features, including a separate motorized bottle cutter, dual hotends for simultaneous extrusion, a filament welder for creating seamless spools, and an improved ink-based filament colorizer. By using a single motor to power both the filament pulling and the filament cutter, PETFusion 2.0 achieves exceptional efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and compactness, making it the ultimate PET bottle recycling solution.

If you want to get involved with this project, head over to the Kickstarter page and check out everything it can do. The project has already smashed its original $1,800 goal, so you don’t need to worry about it getting funded. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like any of the current funding tiers get you a pre-built device; instead, you get the STL file and a list of non-printable components, with higher funding tiers giving you more support and guidance when building it. Still, I can imagine this being an excellent DIY project if you’ve got the guts.