On the 10th of November, 2021, we had the pleasure of chatting with Ryerson University's own Art Seto, a professor at GCM. Art shared with us his insight on the strengths, weaknesses, and future potential of 3D printing, as well as sharing his own experience with making 3D printed face shields and Japanese swords. STYL3D would like to extend our gratitude to Art for taking the time to share his knowledge with us.
Interview conducted by: Sara Al-Basha, Lyara Malvar, Maryam Kakal
Transcription by: Viraj Odedra
Please introduce yourself and tell us about what you do.
My name is Art Seto, and I study printing, and things to do with books, like the history of the book and the making of books, as well areas in management like automation.
What potential does 3D printing technology have to improve sustainability initiatives? How does it need to change to support sustainability?
I think I have a few ideas that come to mind pretty quickly. One of them is comparing 3D printing with what we call subtractive manufacturing, or traditional manufacturing. There, you take a piece of material, you cut it away, use a lathe, a drill, milling machines, or maybe you do things like welding. With 3D printing however, you can make this item all in one pass, with one machine, on the 3D printer. That not only saves time, but it also saves electricity for instance. It also saves materials. That makes 3D printing for certain applications more sustainable. You're using less energy and less carbon emissions. Some particular parts, like a conduit or a pipe that might have a flange on it, has to be made in several parts in traditional manufacturing. In 3D printing, you could do that all at once. You don't have to go from machine to machine to machine. There’s set up time, waste materials, and so on. So much more sustainable with 3D printing. Of course, it’s not for everything. Some things are still better made if you're doing a billion conduits. It's still better to make a mold and injection mold, as opposed to 3D printed. The prediction is 30% of all manufacturing, so zillions of dollars of stuff like plastic bottles, and pipes, is going to end up being 3D printed, just for one of the reasons being sustainability.
At the same time, we can make the parts. We can design the parts to look different in 3D printing than subtractive manufacturing. We can make it a different shape, so that it prints faster, uses less material, and is therefore more sustainable again. So there's a whole bunch of add-on factors that make 3D printing more sustainable. At the same time, we can change the material; so instead of using steel, we could use aluminum, carbon fiber, or titanium. We could use other steels that may be lighter, which saves on shipping costs to get the product to the consumer. At the same time, if you're making parts for a race car or parts for a jet engine, you can reduce the weight of the car and the weight of the airplane, and therefore you reduce the amount of fuel used. In that sense, it's also more sustainable. These are just a couple things I can think of right now.
What kind of impact can 3D printing have on the environment?
As I said in the previous question, we can reduce the part weight and use less fuel, but at the same time, some of the materials we use like PLA, better known as polylactic acid, is actually a plant material product made from starch. Corn starches, or corn, is used to make this product, which makes it environmentally sustainable, and recyclable as well. There are many, many other products in development as well. For instance, PHA, or polyhydroxyalkanoates, is a newer 3D printing material that breaks down in landfills. This product is actually created from bacterial fermentation of lipids and sugars, so it's actually a product that we make like a cake, for instance. These materials and others are in development which is good for the environment in the long term.
What sort of things are limiting 3D printing's potential to grow in the market right now? Are there any hindrances that you feel are taking away from its overall potential?
I’m going to talk about two things: the first one is machine cost, as well as knowledge, skill, or talent. Let's first compare it to what we 3D printing people call 2D printing, or printing on paper. With 2D printing, we have 10 or 20 forms of printing. We have offset printing, gravure printing, flexo printing, pad printing, screen printing—we have many kinds of printing. 3D printing is like that too. We have a whole bunch of different processes, using different substrates, or using lasers, or using melted plastic filament. They’re not as simple as that 3D printer you might have seen in our library. We have 3D printers that start at $300. These are like your consumer printers, sometimes up to $1000; the kind comparable to an inkjet printer at home, or on your office desk. So we have the inexpensive entry level printers, then desktop printers, and then we have prosumer or professional consumer 3D printers, which are maybe $3000 to $5000, but most of us aren't going to afford something like this. The difference between these is that the $300 ones are stripped down, and they have very little to them—very little technology.
You need a different level of skill to be able to operate [3D printers], and not produce things that go to the landfill. So skill level is just not something you think of. In high school and university, a lot of students these days are taking digital media type courses, and they know how to use 2D software like Photoshop or Illustrator, but very few people these days know how to use CAD software, or Computer Assisted Design software, which is required to produce something in a 3D space extruded from a 2D space. So the skill level is not there yet. We don't all graduate from high school or university with 3D CAD skills, so this is going to hold back our ability to produce products in a moment's time. However, with the skill level, you can produce something pretty quickly. For instance, here at the school of GCM, we had a broken part in the Xerox machine and our technician gave me the part and said “Can you build me a part?” An hour later, I had the part designed and 3D printed. So if you have the skill level and you have the machinery, usually at an entry level, you can actually do wonders. 3D printing has a lot of potential for the future, as we get students graduating from high school and universities with 3D CAD experience. At the other level, industrial 3D printers start at $100,000, but usually the ones that are used for industrial production are in the millions of dollars. Think about a web press or a gravure press in the 2D space; these machines are two, three, five million dollars—very similar in the 3D space as well.
We're trying to focus 3D printing towards the fashion industry and combating fast fashion, so what would you predict that the feasibility of 3D printing within the fashion industry would be?
We have to define what the fashion industry is, but I'm going to talk about a few things. If we're talking about garments, say for a person my size—an adult, and if you're trying to produce an entire shirt for instance, you're talking about a piece of fabric that's very large. Maybe a square yard, let's say. So three feet by three feet. You’re talking about a very large piece of material, and 3D printers that can print that large are million-dollar printers. We don't yet have the technology at entry level cost to produce a large piece of fabric, so a lot of the 3D printing that's being done for garments is done as decorative pieces. Maybe they're a shoulder pad. Maybe they're some kind of lacing that's going to go on the front of the garment. The way we print fabric these days is we make what's called chain mail, so it looks like a bunch of chains that are all kind of linked together, and that's what most of the 3D printing fabric looks like these days. So not really there yet—the machinery is not there. We don't have machines like those in 2D printing. You can print something very large using a wide format inkjet machine, but that technology doesn't exist yet for 3D printing. However, there is a new type of 3D printer that has been released in the last year or two that has the ability to print onto a belt that moves, and you can print something much larger. So there is technology that will be developed for that.
If you're talking fashion, maybe you're talking about running shoes: Adidas, Nike, and all the large running shoe companies are producing 3D printed shoes. These are mostly one-off, bespoke-type of shoes, talking $200 to $300. So there is a market for 3D printed running shoes. Of course, using the right material is really important. You need material that's going to not get absorbed by moisture like sweat, isn't going to break down, isn't too rigid, and has to be flexible, so there's a whole bunch of research that has to be done. 3D printed glasses might be considered fashion. In Toronto, we have a company called Specsy that makes 3D printed bespoke spectacles. So in terms of fashion, probably a lot less work has been done and a lot less development, than for novelty items, prototyping, or for a small-run production.
How do you see the future of 3D printing in general, and are there any new innovations within the 3D printing realm that excite you as an expert?
I’m really excited about seeing that houses can be 3D printed, using what looks like large concrete mixers and cranes. Instead of extruding or melting rows of plastic down, and pushing it through a nozzle, what we're doing is we're taking concrete and pushing it through a large spout, and we're laying this down in the shape of the outside of a building. For marginalized communities in, say New York City, small towns like Alabama, or developing countries in Africa or Asia, we can use 3D printing to make houses that are a lot less expensive and a lot faster to make. What’s interesting is I read in the news that Dubai announced it's going to expect by 2025, which is not far away, that 25% of all new buildings have to be made through 3D printing. I'm not sure they're going to make that goal, but it's a great aspiration to happen. Maybe it'll happen in five or ten years, but that's pretty exciting.
There's a lot of novelty type 3D printing being done. For instance, food printing. So we could print sushi. We can print cakes. We can print a lot of different kinds of pizza as well. Apparently there's going to be a 3D printer on the Space Station.
Can you tell us more about some of the projects that you worked on involving 3D printing, and how they have impacted your view of the future of 3D printing?
There are actually millions of desktop consumer 3D printers in homes, and we have one in my house. With this pandemic and the need for PPC, my son and I printed hundreds of face shields that we donated to hospitals and long-term care homes. So not just us, but hundreds of people like us, maybe thousands of us all over the world, sort of jumped in and took on these projects, so that's pretty great. That kind of expanded my mind—we could produce things for community centres, we could teach marginalized kids how to use 3D printers, and we can employ printers that are in community centres or libraries. So there's lots of potential for expanding the use of 3D printers for those who would not have access to them. That's probably the most recent project.
My son is really into all things Japanese; language, anime, gaming, and that sort of thing, and we make a lot of 3D printed swords. These swords are extremely large; they're three to four feet long, and have multiple parts. What we do is we cut them or break them down into individual 3D printed parts, and then we glue them together, add rods, and then we paint them and colour them. My son is really into that sort of thing, so lots of potential for different kinds of 3D printing projects out there.
With how things are going, PPC could even be considered fashion, so that's really interesting.
Absolutely. We're printing them in different colours, and maybe different departments in a hospital would have different colours, or that sort of thing as well.
How would you explain the process of 3D printing to someone who has no knowledge of it?
Well, what we believe is that 3D printing was invented by somebody called Chuck Hall in 1984, and people likened 3D printing to a glue gun. So with a glue gun, you take a long, plastic rod, you put it into a machine, it melts the plastic, and it pushes it through a hole, which we called extruding. An FDM or tabletop consumer 3D printer uses the same concept. We take rows of wire, we melt it down, we push it through a hole, and then we move our nozzle into a 3D space, so x, y, z. As we do that, we build up the product. So the product could be hollow, or it could have moving parts on it as well. 3D printing is really a way of doing something we call additive manufacturing. We add material to create a product, rather than subtract material, which is used in traditional manufacturing where you cut away a block of water, steel, or plastic. In a nutshell, that's what it is: it's sort of a glue gun on steroids.
3D printing is more accessible than ever now due to commercially available printers: do you think this hurts or helps the 3D printing industry at the manufacturing level?
So 3D printing was invented in 1984. It was sort of table top, and was used for rapid prototyping: “I’m going to make one part. I'm going to test it out, and then make another iteration of it.” That went on for a decade or two, under a patent. Once the patent came off, what happened was suddenly these plans are available to everybody, so many people started making 3D printers, or consumer 3D printers. All the components are there, and you could buy microcomputers. You could buy gears. You could buy chassis. You could buy all kinds of parts and make your own 3D printer. So suddenly an industry was born; it was no longer just academia and research. We're talking about 2004 approximately, and suddenly there's all these small, 3D companies. At the same time, many of the other processes were born. In 2D print, we have offset, gravure, flexo and so on. Suddenly, there were all these other processes that came about, so not just printing from a roll of plastic, but printing from powder. A powder could be metal powder, or it could be plastic powder. So all these processes came along, and then all these large industrial 3D printing companies came along making million-dollar machines, instead of the $300 to $500 machines that we have in our home. There was a very, very public break between consumer 3D printing and commercial 3D printing. With commercial 3D printing, you're talking million-dollar machines; I can make a wing for an airplane, or I can make a door for a car, or that sort of thing. Then there’s consumer 3D printing, where we could just make the little, smaller things that are in size of one foot by one foot by one foot cube, rather than something that was three feet or eight feet in dimension. There's a lot of opportunity for 3D printing in the consumer space, where we're just doing single parts, novelty items, or promotional items that we're giving away at trade shows to promote our company.
3D printing hasn't reached its potential at all. We're maybe at one percent or one one-hundredth of one percent of its potential. There's competition, but there's also much more room for growth. There are a lot of people like myself, or even GCM grads that have taken our 3D printing course who have bought a 3D printer, and they're selling 3D printing services. They've become a surface bureau, working out of their garage, or their basement. You make enough business, then you buy a second printer. Another $500 to $1000 dollars, you buy another printer. The cost of entry is very low for getting into the 3D printing business. So I think it's accessible right now to anybody that has the skill and has the vision, and can afford $500 or $1000 for an entry level machine. I don't think this takes away from the manufacturing—the large industrial manufacturers who are making airplane parts, car parts, race car parts, and those sorts of things.
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