Recycled potato chip bags are the new wave of 3D printing

3D printing is the future of fabrication, but there's one problem: It uses a lot of plastic. Enter 3D Brooklyn, a small studio that uses materials that can't be recycled the old-fashioned way, like potato chip bags, as the raw ingredients for its 3D-printed objects. Chip bags are made from a blend of polypropylene and polyethylene, which makes them difficult for conventional recycling programs to reuse. The studio sources its chip bags from TerraCycle, a New Jersey-based recycling company, which melts the bags down and forms them into pellets. The team at 3D Brooklyn uses those pellets to make filament — the main ingredient used in 3D printing — that they sell to other companies for their own printing operations.