A year in green tech: 3-D printing

Like most members of my generation, I remember the red and blue glasses that people would wear to watch three-dimensional movies - which had been invented a generation earlier - and then three-dimensional television.  They did not really work all that well for TV, but the movie experience was entertaining...even if most of the movies were not.  It is funny now that almost every major action movie gets released in a 3-D version, my family and I vote much more often to watch the 2-D version.

With three dimensional entertainment still more of a fashion than a value-added experience, there is a 3-D technology that could completely change our quality of life and even the way that we think of moving goods and resources.  Three-dimensional printing offers the possibility to create objects with a minimum of waste, and at the user scale not the industrial scale.  The technology follows a simple principle of adding material to create a model, item, or form.  Traditionally, we either cast items in injection molding, or we machine away material from a stock to create a solid object.  The first takes significant amounts of energy to accomplish the end goal, while the second either wastes material or takes time to collect and recycle the remnants.  In 3-D printing, the device continuously layers material to build the item.  It uses only the material necessary to create the finished product.


How will this change the way we live?

Airwolf 3D

Currently, we use most of the items we own only a fraction of their useful lives.  For many of these, we only need them for minutes, then we do not need them again for a long period of time.  Instead of having to own all of these only to use them sporadically, what if we could use the item, break it down into its constituent materials, then reform it into something else that we need.  If we continue to do this over and over again, we not only eliminate the concept of waste, we minimize the amount of resources we need to support our quality of life.  It will take the addition of energy to continually make the changes to the material, but given the amount of renewable energy available to us, and the knowledge we have of how to do most everything else with a minimum of energy use, tackling both concerns coincidently seems well within our technological grasp.

In manufacturing, 3-D printing can reshape industry.  Currently, our manufacturing industry works with a small number of relatively large scale points taking stock resources and assembling finished products that they then ship to a larger number of wholesale or retail outlets.  This requires "double handling" of first the stock material and then the finished product.  It also creates "feast and famine" economies for many towns that host these large scale operations.  Down the road, as technology improves, we can move to the point where each community has multiple manufacturing centers similar to today's big-box retail.  In those spaces, stock materials and a small-number of manufactured-for-assembly items would arrive, and a local workforce would use these inputs to create the products that their community needs.  If a resident or small business owner needs a specialty replacement part, they do not have to worry about a manufacturer no longer supporting the item, they just send a scale image to the center and receive a new one within hours.  Institutions already are doing this and saving both time and money.

Three-dimensional printing does have challenges.  First, the process moves slowly, and currently only supports small-scale items on even a remotely commercial level.  Also, with the level of current technology development, the quality of the finished product does not meet the expectations many of us have for some items.  Industry has made much progress, and just today, HP announced that they have made some breakthroughs on both these issues and will have an announcement later this year.  That may just amount to corporate propaganda, but the presence of such a large company in the arena means that capital and talent have converged on the issue.

The technology will not, in and of itself, feed an ever-growing population, or right all the injustices of inequality that threaten our quality of life.  It does move us one step closer to making life easier to support with fewer resources, and given our current projected predicament, every improvement helps.