The environmental side of our hobby is a worry for me, from the plastic sprues that cant be recycled (not easily) through to 3D printing, I think as hobbyists we tend to brush it aside as a necessity for our enjoyment much the same as any other hobby does, take motoring enthusiasts for example.

Plastic-wise, as the hard plastic sprues cannot be recycled (at least locally) I put these in the bin, alongside failed prints from my filament printer. Better than putting them, in the plastic waste where they will just get shipped abroad if its no an accepted type or identifiable.

While not ideal I do know that all my local general waste goes to the Local Energy Recovery facility, we closed our landfill sites several years ago. Basically, the waste gets burned, the energy from this is used for the district heating system in the city center alongside power being generated. So while not perfect this at least reduces the number of fossil fuels that would otherwise be used. So from a hard plastic and filament point of view, I feel I’m doing the best I can, much better than the waste sitting in a landfill site.

What worries me much more about 3D printing is the resins, these are highly toxic to the environment with basically no regulation, I was mortified when @johnlyons mentioned rinsing “water washable” resin under the tap and down the sink, that’s going straight into the environment. For this I put the blame mostly on the Chinese companies that are making and pushing these printers and their marketing, they simply want to produce and sell more products any way they can, there’s very little solidly reliable educational material on how these substances should be handled and the marketing around “water washable” is very missleading.