Filabot Turns Your Plastic Junk Into Material for 3-D Printers | Wired Design | Wired.com

For desktop 3-D printers to work, they need some kind of material to work with. Most contemporary printers use plastic filament, available in spools from various suppliers. Filabot reduces the need for that stuff. Instead you can grind up household plastics or even past projects to make new lines.

Think a meat grinder on top of a pasta maker and you get the general idea. “Plastic extrusion is nothing new,” says McNaney in the Kickstarter pitch video. “The only thing we’d like to do is adapt it to the desktop environment.”

The need for something like this is enormous. The whole point of 3-D printing is that you can do rapid prototyping and customization of parts.