What substance could make 3-D printing cheaper?

Tired of purchasing expensive resin for high-precision 3-D printing in the laboratory, University of Toronto Scarborough Professor Andre Simpson wanted to find a cheaper alternative. So Simpson and his team in the university’s Environmental NMR Centre set out to see if they could come up with an alternative substance that could be printed at the same high-precision level as expensive commercial resins.

The solution came in the form of waste cooking oil from McDonald’s. “We found that McDonald’s waste cooking oil has excellent potential as a 3-D printing resin,” Simpson said. After subjected a liter of used cooking oil to a chemical treatment process, the team had 420 milliliters of usable resin. They used it to print a highly detailed plastic butterfly, with fine details at the 100-micrometer level. The butterfly didn’t break or melt when subjected to tests, proving the strength of the new resin was equal to that of its more expensive commercial counterpart.

What’s more, the team estimates that producing the cooking oil-based resin would cost about $300 per ton. Most traditional commercial high-resolution resins cost more than $525 per liter.