Autotruder - Upcycling Beverage Bottles

Single-use plastic beverage bottles can be recycled by cutting them into long strips which can be used a number of ways. Pulling the strips through a heated die to make them into 3D printer filament not only recycles the bottle, but up-cycles it. We will exhibit the current state of the art, which is mostly a manual process whose resulting filament isn’t economically competitive. We envision an automated pultrusion process that accepts unwashed 2-liter bottles and produces quality filament with zero waste products. This is a multi-stage process, including bottle washing, bottle preparation, bottle cutting, strip pultrusion, filament winding, filament splicing, filament packaging and byproduct processing, Every stage is a candidate for automation.