Here’s an eye opener: the next time you walk, keep your eyes on the ground for a while to see how far you can go without finding a accidentally discarded mask. In our experience, it’s no more than a block or two, especially if you live near the school. Masks and other disposal items from the covid-19 pandemic have become a threat, and billions of things will block landfills, waterways and trails in the coming decades.
Of course, unless they can be recycled into useful things, such as plastic boxes for rapid antigen detection. This is designed by the University of Bristol and error. If this sounds or looks familiar, think back to October, when the same team proposed a way to turn old masks into 3D printer filaments. The current work is an extension of this work, but the polypropylene particles recovered from the old mask are sent to the desktop injection molding machine.
The injection molding machine is equipped with a 3D printing mold of the lateral flow device (LFD) shell for cvid-19 rapid antigen test. The mold is designed with fusion 360 and printed on elegoo Mars msla printer with high-strength high-temperature resistant resin. These molds have well withstood the test of manual injection molding process and produced high-quality parts with familiar blue and white as raw materials. This is clearly a proof of concept, but it’s nice to see someone think about how we can deal with the millions of tons of plastic waste generated by the pandemic response.
