I think you need to adjust your “nones”, maybe your sense of smell is not very sensitive. PLA definitely has an odor, it is relatively pleasant, but can be unpleasant at higher concentrations. PETG has a smell that is unpleasant, it is not as bad as ASA, but bad enough that it is probably not good to be breathing it. I haven’t printed with my TPU yet, but it probably also has a smell.
Thanks for pointing that out. I quickly read an MSDS on PET-CF, and it made no mention at all of this potential risk. In a way, I’d rather be dealing just with VOCs, because if I were to, say, have a printer in an initially closed room but, say, open a window to the outdoors, then eventually those VOCs will be completely gone and not coming back (well, at least not before the next printing). Not so with lots of ultrafine particles. In theory I can imagine that stuff might get spread all over everything and consequently require a lot of cleaning to get rid of it.
In terms of the damage it might do, I just hope it isn’t anything like asbestos. Why?
Not only did workers at asbestos mines get mesothelioma, but so did their entire family, because when they came home from work it was on their clothes and in their hair, and then spread from there until it got all over their family members and throughout their homes. A real tragedy…
At present I have very limited exposure to printing pollution–far less now than when I first started printing and was hovering around the printers a lot because they were so often going off the rails–so I’m not particularly worried. If I were actively running a large print farm or otherwise printing a lot all the time, I’d look a lot more deeply into mitigation strategies.
All of the filaments are not “Safe”. Even PLA IS NOT.
All emit a smell, microparticels and voc.
PLA less than PETG or ABS, but all do.
IT IS a fairytale that PLA or PETG IS SAFE…
WHO ever told this does that for Marketing.
Plastic IS molden and heated. That IS the Problem.
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You may be giving yourself a false sense of security by considering any of the plastics in the list safe-ish without ventilation.
Here is an article that basically says between the fine plastic particulates along with all the things they mix in to make the filament and variations between companies, you can’t be sure how harmful is. It also says filters don’t do enough, they are not fine enough, even the filtration built into the industrial machines is not enough. It is best to make sure you have good ventilation and make that your starting point, especially if people other than yourself are being exposed to it. PLA may or may not be directly harmful, buy other components mixed in may be. And getting high enough concentration of PLA particles in your lungs could be damaging even if it is not considered toxic.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90269252/3d-printed-particles-can-embed-themselves-in-your-lungs-forever
Your post was flagged and I can’t see what you actually said. Did you say anything that warranted being flagged? Based on the follow up posts and the limited quotes made about what you said, it didn’t seem like it was warranted to hide your post.
Bambu should change their forum so that if a person’s post is flagged by another poster that it is hidden with the option for people to click a button to see it. Until it is reviewed by Bambu so they can decide if it should be deleted or unhidden.
I think it is visible again. Judge for yourself.
FWIW, I thought the fastcompany link was informative. Thank you for sharing it.
I think a good next step would be to find some sensors that are specifically tuned to finding 3D printing emissions. I’ve sampled quite a few off-the-shelf air quality monitors, and they don’t see much. Therefore, moving ahead on this probably requires looking through the digikey catalog and building something custom.
If we had such a thing, then, if nothing else, it could tell you when things have been vented enough, or filtered enough, or just settled down enough to re-enter a room after printing. As things stand, you don’t really know, and you could drive yourself crazy on expensive mitigating measures that, in the end, may not be needed if you can remotely print and come back when it’s safe to do so. I think where things get expensive is if you need to be present in the same room as where the printing is happening, and the air needs to get cleaned in real time.
Definitely not warranted at all. And also your post was not off topic at all. The original post came with incorrect and potentially dangerous assumptions, which your post challenged.
Completely ridiculous that they would think it was justified to flag your post.
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I have one of these close to the printer, and whilst it seems like you occasionally get a lemon, (guess it’s due to the electronics actually being sensitive… dur).
It’s very sensitive and have pretty fast polling, mine picks up VoC trending upward as soon as a PLA print starts, and the particulates start climbing as well. ive never tested how high they reach since i paired it with this FÖRNUFTIG air purifier, white, 12x18" - IKEA right next to the A1. Running both hepa and carbon filter. I had these products since earlier, this was just my hack solution since i hadnt found a dedicated place for the printer, the air purifier can be mounted on the wall as well and exhausts upwards, so i was toying with mounting it horizontal above the printer to circulate and clean the output, but i’ll probably design a scrubber system for myself.
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I have yet to find ANY alarming information in any of Bambu’s TDS, MSDS or RoHS. It appears to me the MSDS only considers the filament on its spool and not when it’s printed(!!). And RoHS only cares about things like lead.
Here’s the MSDS for Bambu’s ABS. There’s barely anything in it that sounds scary at all. Makes me worried about all those kids with printers running in their bedroom while they sleep.
That’s crazy that they don’t have to mention in the MSDS all the chemical fumes that come from ABS when printing. What a useless document.
This post talks about the toxicity of different filament.
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A lot to digest there, but if I’m reading it right, it sounds as though they measured PETG, ASA, and TPU as being the least polluting. Apparently some of the PLA did well, but the worst PLA was 300 times worse than that, so maybe that is what skewed its overall result.
Also rather counterintuitive that ASA did so well in their measurements. I had always just assumed it was in more or less the same bucket as ABS.
Anyhow, as a first pass, perhaps this gives answers to what the OP originally wanted to know. I was thinking of switching to PLA instead of PETG as my daily driver, but this gives me reason to stand pat.
Good find, and on point!
If you are talking about the science direct article, you are reading it wrong. PLA was found to be the least harmful.
Hmmm… taking a closer look at it, apparently what I said was true only in regards to the particle emissions:
which, according to them, is not a useful indicator for VOC emissions, which is the other dimension that they measured.
So, to get a more complete picture, you need to consider particle emissions on the one hand and VOC on the other. However, after trying to fuse the two datasets together, I still don’t seem to be getting a very clear picture of overall winners and losers. In that regard, did anything stand out for you? Were you able to assemble a rank order of the different filament types from best to worst?
Their other advice seemed kinda generic: print in a well ventilated area, and to further reduce exposure don’t sit too close to the printer, especially while it’s printing.
My advice for 3d-Printing:
1.) Use a room dedicated to the printer (sperated from livingspace, closable).
2.) Use Airpurifiers in that room, minimum one, better two of diffrent types and BentoBox in Printer
3.) Build an enclosure arround the printer if possible.
4.) Ventilate air regualry. (open window for example)
5.) If possible, build an air-vent-system to the enclosure if possible
So…
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For that chart, the grey background gradient indicates the concentration of particles in the air. The vertical axis, is the number of times the air in the room gets replaced per hour. The horizontal axis is the volume of air in the room, basically meaning a bigger room.
So the lines closer to the top right have lower concentrations and the lines in the bottom left have high concentrations.
It doesn’t help that there are so many different terms and abbreviations even mean different things.
NER
particle Number Emission Rate
MER
particle Mass Emission Rate
or
Mean Emission Rate
SER
Significant Emission Rate
or
area Specific Emission Rate
Another data point (mentioned elsewhere on this forum IIRC) is that Bambu printers tend to heat the filaments a lot more than most other printers. This could mean some papers that indicate low emissions doesn’t quite apply to the Bambu world.
More food for thought:
When you buy a roll of PLA the plastic does not only contain PLA, but also softners, stabilizers and pigment. All these ingredients differ between different manufacturers. I don’t know if pigments aerosolize during printing aswell, then even the color of your plastic can be important.
So for example, PLA of one manufatturer can be “safe” and from another one can be toxic because they use different softners and stabilizers and pigments.
In conclusion, there is not much you can say in general about the danger of a specific material when printing.
The only thing that we know that DOES makes a significant difference is… ventilation!