A desktop 3D printer buzzes for hours, building its creation layer by layer from melted plastic. Nearby, a growing pile of scraps collects; tangled filament and failed prints from previous runs.
In Makerspaces, these leftovers are jokingly called “printer poop,” but the nickname hides a serious and increasingly common waste stream.
Consider what 3D printing often looks like in everyday spaces.
A print may run for hours, only for the layers to misalign or detach, leaving behind a web of unusable hardened plastic. A finished object may require support structures that are snapped off and thrown away within seconds.
Though often seen as efficient, 3D printing can require multiple attempts to get a design right, generating plastic waste with each run; according to research highlighted by King’s College London, around one-third of all filament used in 3D printing becomes waste.
That pattern is reflected in the work led by Cassandra Telenko, a sustainability researcher and mechanical engineer who previously worked at Georgia Institute of Technology and now serves as a lead scientist at UL Solutions. In a 2019 study of 3D printing in university MakerSpaces, Telenko’s research reported a 41.1% print failure rate, indicating that a large portion of prints do not succeed in real-world environments.
That level of failure is not surprising to her.
“It was a high number… I was sad that it was so high, but also just kind of viewing the machines and the quality of the parts… there are a whole lot of reasons, even in professional manufacturing, why something might fail,” Telenko said.
Over the past decade, 3D printing has moved far beyond industrial laboratories. Machines that once cost thousands of dollars are now sold through platforms like Amazon and Walmart for only a few hundred. As the technology becomes more affordable and accessible, its use continues to grow across both educational and consumer settings.
Nearly a decade ago, the Horizon Report: 2015 K-12 Edition by the New Media Consortium identified 3D printing as an emerging technology poised to enter classrooms and makerspaces. Today, we begin to see increasing adoption of 3D printing in K–12 schools, universities, and maker-centered learning environments.
At the University of Southern California’s Maker Space, 3D printing is already part of everyday student work. Krish Shah, a sophomore and student worker in the 3D printing lab, said it plays a key role in rapid prototyping and design.
“I think it is a fast way to get your prototype out there,” Shah said. “Most of the things we 3D print are for research projects or class projects where the timeframe is quite short, so you need to have something that can be ready in a very short amount of time. It is also quite economical to 3D print things, at least on a small scale.”
He added that 3D printing simplifies the creation of complex designs that would otherwise be difficult to produce using traditional materials like wood or metal.
Yet the same features that make 3D printing efficient also contribute to its waste problem. Many prints require support structures to hold up complex shapes during the layer-by-layer printing process.
“Support structures are something that is innately required for 3D printing,” Shah explained.
Even beyond student use, failure is not limited to beginners. Telenko pointed to research in professional manufacturing, where identical designs sent to different production labs produced inconsistent results in quality and structural integrity.
“Even in professional manufacturing… they sent the same design to multiple job shops… and then reviewed the quality … there are a whole lot of reasons … why something might fail,” she said.
The environmental cost of this expansion is often overlooked. Although common materials such as PLA and ABS (these are the types of plastic used as printing fillment) are technically recyclable, most municipal recycling systems are not built to process small, specialized filament scraps. Recycling systems are designed for large, uniform packaging materials like bottles and containers, not small, irregular fragments of filament. Waste management guidance explains that items smaller than about 2×2 inches often cannot be sorted properly and become contaminated in recycling streams.
Beyond plastic waste, 3D printing also raises concerns about energy use and emissions.
“These machines can be energy intensive,” Telenko said. “Energy use is a big factor.”
She also noted that improving failure rates and material reuse will be key to reducing overall impact.
In addition to waste, many are concerned about health impacts from the printing process itself.
“Plastics are melting, and there are unhealthy fumes that come from that,” Telenko said, adding that printers should be used in well-ventilated spaces, especially around younger users.
The problem is not limited to the waste itself, but changing the systems surrounding it. Most consumer printers rely on thermoplastics that are marketed as accessible and convenient, but not realistically recyclable for the average user. Recycling these scraps back into usable filament is possible in theory. Some experimental systems (Filabot and Precious Plastic machines) have shown that plastic can be shredded, melted, and re-extruded into new filament while recovering a large percentage of the original material.
However, those systems are rarely practical for schools, hobbyists, or small maker spaces. Recycling machines can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars and often require careful sorting, technical knowledge, and consistent maintenance. For most everyday users, that burden is unrealistic.
Even attempts to reduce waste during the printing process involve trade-offs. As Shah explained, users often have to choose between efficiency and reliability. “You can minimize supports and risk failure, or add more supports and reduce the chance of failure,” he said.
Other efforts to reduce waste focus on design changes, such as splitting an object into smaller pieces to reduce the need for support structures. While this can save material in some cases, it also creates new problems. Multi-part designs take longer to print, require more assembly, and may depend on adhesives or joints that weaken the final product. These workarounds may reduce waste slightly, but they do not solve the larger issue.
At the same time, those users are often making decisions based on limitations of the machines themselves.
“At Makerspace, the goal is to print as many things as possible without printer downtime,” Shah said. “Even if you add more support and increase print time slightly, it is better than risking a failed print.”
What makes this problem especially significant is that responsibility has been placed on the wrong people. Students, educators, and hobbyists are often expected to research recycling methods, redesign objects, and even purchase specialized equipment to manage waste more responsibly. As Shah explained, print failures can result from “machine error”, material conditions like moisture in the filament, or issues with the design file itself. The people generating the waste are not the ones designing the system.
This is where policy becomes important.
California leaders have already argued that companies, not consumers, should be responsible for the full lifecycle of the products they create, especially when it comes to plastic waste. When signing the state’s landmark plastics law, Gavin Newsom said, “Our kids deserve a future free of plastic waste… we’re holding polluters responsible and cutting plastics at the source.” That framing places responsibility squarely on manufacturers, not the people using the products.
State Senator Ben Allen, who authored the law, reinforced that approach, emphasizing that it “brought together the environmental and business communities” to create a stronger system of producer responsibility. California has already applied this model to packaging, textiles, and hazardous waste. But as 3D printing expands into classrooms, libraries, and homes, that same logic has yet to be applied to filament, resin, or the growing volume of failed prints.
In other industries, environmental problems like this are not left to individual users to figure out on their own. Systems like extended producer responsibility, or EPR, shift that burden back onto manufacturers. Under these policies, companies are held responsible for what happens to their products after people are done using them, including how they are collected, recycled, or disposed of.
California already uses EPR policies for items such as batteries, paint, mattresses, carpet, and packaging. This creates enforceable systems that reduce landfill disposal and push companies to redesign products to be less wasteful in the first place.
The rise of consumer 3D printing makes the absence of this kind of policy more visible. The technology is no longer experimental or limited to specialized labs. It is now embedded in classrooms, libraries, homes and maker spaces, where plastic waste is produced repeatedly and at scale. Without clear regulations, the burden continues to fall on individual users, even though the design of the materials and machines remains in the hands of manufacturers.,