3D-Printing With Orange Peels 

why does it have holes in the side? that's a terrible cup dude.

It's just an additive to an already existing plastic. You could be printing with anything ground up and mixed with this plastic. PLA is already corn based.

Looks like another sustainability major who has no concept of energy. Grinding the orange peels, heating the pla to make the new filament, then heating it again to print the cups just so you can say we did something with the orange peels.

Drinking orange juice from an orange 😊😊😊

Great idea... except designing a cup with holes in the sides...

That's pretty awesome!!

So the peel is just a filler... right... not an active ingredient?

Why not just use the orange peels to make a flavor additive using the oils present in them? Do the same thing as which is done to lemon peels, slice the orange peels into slices, put into a bowl and cover them in granulated white sugar, wait for a while for the sugar to absorb the flavor and then you can probably candy the peels afterwards, keeping the sugary mixture for enhancing the flavor of your juice and or selling it as a product. If the orange peels have a lot of pith or whatever on them, just scrape it off with a simple tool to leave the rind part that you want. You used the entire orange, except for the seeds. Perhaps just use the seeds to grow more trees? You can use the newly planted trees as a way to secure your resources, like an investment in your business for the future. Now you're using the entire orange, juice, rind, seeds, the only thing remaining is perhaps the pulp if it gets filtered out, maybe just dry that and then add it to baking to add fiber and a slight orangy flavor? Technically I did mention a waste of the pith, so perhaps just dump that on your orange trees to help with fertilizing the soil? Making worse quality plastic is dumb. Hell, you could probably just use some technique to take out all the oils from the peel so that you can then use the fiber in the peel to make paper for your cups if you really, really want to use orange peel in your cups. PLA would be my last guess to use because it would probably just make the drinking experience worse than if you just used a regular cup. Hell, you could probably just use the peel as a cup. It would hold the same amount of juice probably. It would most certainly also empart a stronger orange scent which would actually enhance the drinking experience.

How much orange peel vs pla goes into each cup?

Just because you put oranges into PLA doesn't make it a 3D printing material... it's just a stretcher that doesn't even work (holes all over the cup). If you made a PLA cup it would be better, because people won't throw it away as readily. And because it has oranges in it, doesn't mean you got rid of the PLA waste... it actually makes it more wasteful because you use PLA on something that is obviously worthless. Who ever funded this project should be ashamed.

They couldn't even make a single cup without holes in it for the videotaped demo!!!? And it's not even made of orange peels, it's made of PLA with some orange peel thrown in. Can you imagine how much bacteria will be growing in that "peel" bin? And why tf is that printer so large? It's printing a cup!

But... half of orange peel have a cup form already.

You can powderize anything & add it to plastic, but why? For Proto-pasta the point was scent while printing for the printer operator. We've produced coffee, cinnamon, rose & pine filaments for a pleasant scent & unique texture when 3D printing, but I don't understand the point here, do you?

Damn that's a huge delta printer for such a tiny cup! I love that they're doing it though

I don't even want to know how much electricity that thing uses.

How much PLA is used?

The energy and money needed to convert those peels into "bio-plastic" would FAR outweigh just recycling the paper biodegradable cups......

I would make good use out of a system like this.

so much work to produce expensive and not quite biodegradable paper cup? just compost peels and put em back in soil for orange trees.

How many chemicals leach into drink

Environmental Circularity sounds like something should go back to the Earth probably. Time to google what that term actually means!

Haha. I'd be fucked if I drank from this cup, I'm allergic to oranges, pretty cool though

They look nasty and I’m allergic to orange peels