A startup called Vitriform3D has developed an innovative 3D printing process that makes use of the abundance of post-consumer glass. In collaboration with experts from Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL’s) Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (MDF), the fledgling firm is already making high-value products from waste glass material that may have ended up in a landfill.

Ordinarily, glass recyclers are quite fussy with colors and grades of glass, etc., and a lot of energy is used to melt and reform post-consumer glass to make new products/packaging. Vitriform3D doesn’t seem as particular, as all its process requires is crushed bottles. We see in the video, and on the firm’s website, that it does sometimes separate certain colors before crushing, as that provides more interesting ‘inks’ for its 3D printing process.

Binder jet technology is the patent-pending process behind Vitriform3D’s products that embody a philosophy of “sustainability that sparkles.” Using this method, the firm has already enjoyed success in producing and marketing a range of kitchen countertops, floor tiles, architectural wall accents, and more.

“You take a thin layer of material, most times it's powder. It can be metal powder, it can be ceramic powder,” explains Ryan Dehoff from ORNL’s MDF in the video, embedded above. “We lay that powder out in a very thin sheet. And then we essentially take an ink jet [printer] head, and we put some sort of binder agent where we want to print or glue that material together.” From then on, all the binder jet 3D printer needs to do is repeat the process, again and again, building up a 3D object. Optimizing the binder agent's chemical formula has been one of the more important parts of this project.

It is noted that binder jet tech isn’t limited to glass. The process can use “almost any material” in powder form as the major constituent, according to the video. Glass is a particularly innovative choice, though, because of its physical properties, colors, and abundance.

Overall, the binder jet process sounds like something that would scale up well. We’d also welcome the patent-pending process scaling down to the desktop/hobbyist 3D printer space.

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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.