Do you know that one and every 3 kilograms of three printing filaments such as PLA or ABS gets discarded? Unlike other plastics, three D printing filaments cannot be recycled at your standard community recycling center, instead, must be taken to a specialized facility, which uses a chemical or mechanical recycling process. These processes are costly, energy demanding, inefficient, and polluting, and furthermore, often degrades the quality of the filament produced. Refill is a patent technology for reprocessing waste the reprinted PLA ABS into reprintable PLA ABS hybrid filaments made from 100% recycled material without the use of any additives or chemical treatments. Using a separation and extrusion process that is low cost non toxic, vimous friendly and efficient, we're able to recycle the dipinting filaments into new materials that can be printed again. So how does it work? First, we collect PLA and ABS waste from local maker spaces and facilities. The waste is the crushed into smaller fragments for a density based separation process, where it's mixed into a sodium chlide solution that separates the denser PLA and the less dense ABS. After separation, the fragments are rinsed and dried to prevent contamination, and then a patented mixing ratio of the PLN ABS is blended together and extruded. The resulting material is cooled and spooled leaving behind high quality spools of recycled filament made from 100% recycled material. Compared to current technologies which require high energy processes, expensive chemicals and additives, and sometimes even extra version materials, fills two step process allows for PL and ABS to be separated from the wastetream and immediately extruded into new filament without the need for any intermediary processes or chemical compatibizers. This makes me feel much more straightforward, sustainable, cost effective, and innovative, dramatically decreasing the cost of conventional filament recycling. Refal filament is high quality, has high structural durability, low maintenance cost, and comparable print quality to versi materials. So on both of your tables is a role of our filament that's completely recycled, as well as just a three D printer, three D print that we use with the filament. Yeah. So our recycle filaments are 50% cheaper than comparable recycled brands and 30% cheaper than even virgin materials for the same 1 kilogram role. Our recycling costs are by far the lowest in the industry by a wide margin, thanks to our efficient process for manufacturing and material acquisition. The quality of our product is on par with other brands, while being significantly more sustainable as it is 100% recycled. According to Motor Intelligence, a market research firm. The three printing filament market is expected to reach $2.21 billion by 2029. Because our filaments have similar properties to virgin materials, we expect 80% of the market to confidently adopt our product. And by 2028, we plan to capture $20 million. For our financials, our only cost of goods sold is our material acquisition costs, which estimate to be around $2 per kilogram, as the other costs are negligible per unit produced. This leaves us a $13 profit per unit sold. In addition, we expect to incur an operating cost of $300,000 in our first year of operation, leaving us an operating margin of 63%. We're confident that our networking growth strategy will allow us to double our revenue every year in the next five years, reaching cumulatively $20 million. In 2025, we will open up Colorado production with two extruders and scale it up to 12 extruders yielding more than 600 kilograms per year, 600,000 sorry, kilograms per year. This growth is still sustainable as we'll be capturing less than 1% of the projected market size. Okay. So to expand? Our waste collection, we plan to use cross channel outreach through the Internet or local connections. This allows us to partner with local businesses as we're helping collect their waste filament. To expand our consumer segment, we plan to use multimedia marketing to establish a strong reputation as a high quality low cost filament. For our initial funding, we plan to get certain grants from government organizations such as the US Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, as well as a few private investors. As of now, we've been able to partner with over a dozen local maker spaces and has successfully recycled over 150 kilograms of filament. With our patented technology, a resign has been validated and recognized by several lo institutions. Among them, CSU, C Boulder, the Society of Manufacturing engineers, and Rocky Tech. Here's our 13. Thank you. Thank you. 3 minutes for questions? Okay. So waste collection you have on your thing, but I'd like to know more about how you're getting the material from the suppliers to wherever you're manufacturing the material. Total, yeah. So currently, we're running small scale pilots in around a dozen local maker spaces. And what we're doing this is basically by putting out boxes like this in these makers bases to collect the waste. And so right now we're doing everything for free, collecting the waste in those boxes and sort of distributing the recycled filament to the makers bases as well. Are they mailing you the boxes, or are you going to pick up we're collecting. For now, we're collecting themselves in the future, again, let me get global expansion. We're hoping to sort of set up a logistic and shipping network to transfer the materials. That's why in our financials, we accounted for $2 per the one before. Yeah. No, no, sorry, again, yeah. $2 for waste acquisition, is $2 includes the cost to obtain and transfer the weight into our facilities. Obviously, usually when you dro away waste, it's free, but we took into account the fact that sometimes we'd have to pay eventually when you scala to get that waste and recycle. Yeah. Take your low. That's a per kilogram. Yeah. I got you. Okay. I have that same question. So people are mailing you potentially these items, and are you subsidizing that in some way to encourage them to sell you basically their waste or you're just expecting them to want to sell you or send you the items. A key element of the growth strategy is partnering with local businesses and sort of giving them reduced prices as well on the recycled filment Because again, we're able to sort of turn initial waste materials that they're throwing away into new filment that they can use again. And that new fiment is very valuable, especially if it has quality comparable to rsion materials that can sell for a lot more. And again, that's really the idea, we have so much control over pricing and manufacturing that these sort of nuances in the shipping cost of the Mason steel don't affect our margins too much, especially since we have a lot of control over the production and technology problems. I guess I'm interested to know how you guys managed to get almost 100%, like, capture with the filament to then create this new product, which I mean feels nice, but all your competitors who have been in the market, I'm assuming longer than you guys have been haven't achieved that. So how have you guys managed to do that? A large part of the inefficiency of current recycling processes is they generally use chemical additives, and things like compatibizers, which basically allow you to mix the filament together and then sort of create new fils better. And the issue with this is there's a lot of loss with film, especially if the chemical reaction with the compatibizer is incomplete. And also, a lot of times they'll really high energy processes things like pyrolysis, breaking the polymer chain down to monomers and they rebuilding back up. And that's really inefficient. And so, in this case, what we're doing here is, since it's only a mechanical recycling process. We're actually just combining the ABS and the PLA together during extrtion. There's no filament loss as well, and we can compare the ratios and make sure that we're achieving the right ratio every single time during the extruion process. Yeah. And also the thing is a lot of companies, they recycle only PLA or only ADS, and this leads to degradation in the quality. But with our hybrid filling, we're combining these together to create this our new filament. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
2024 Diamond Challenge Summit -9- Refil
From Andrew Brett June 03, 2024
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The Diamond Challenge provides a unique opportunity for teens to learn about entrepreneurship while putting their ideas into action.
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