Green Ellipsis - Autotruder - Upcycling Beverage Bottles

Single-use plastic beverage bottles can be cut into long strips to be pulled through a heated die the same diameter of 3D printer filament. This 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.