Sustainability & community

3D printing has a plastic problem. We'd rather be honest about that than greenwash it — so here's exactly what we do about it, and what we don't.

Paper-first packaging

Paper honeycomb, not bubble wrap. Boxed orders are packed with expanded paper honeycomb. It cushions as well as bubble wrap, and unlike bubble wrap or foam peanuts it goes straight into your household paper recycling — no separating, no landfill.

Paper tape, not plastic. We seal boxes with paper tape rather than the usual plastic packing tape. It's a small detail that makes a practical difference at your end: there's nothing to strip off before the box goes into the recycling bin, so the whole parcel — box, tape and cushioning — is one material.

The exception, so you're not surprised. Small, light items sometimes go out in a padded mailer, and those are bubble-lined. Sending a single lightweight part in a box would mean more material and a heavier parcel, not less, so for now the mailer is the better trade-off. Anything that ships in a box gets paper.

Reused filament boxes. Filament arrives at our workshop in strong double-wall cardboard boxes. Instead of flattening them for recycling, we keep them and ship customer orders in them. A box that was built for one journey makes at least two. If your parcel looks like it's had a previous life, that's deliberate.

Right-sized parcels. We pack to the size of the part, not to a standard box. Smaller parcels mean less filler, less card, and less air being driven around Ireland.

Making only what's needed

Print on demand. Nothing is mass-produced on spec. Your part is printed after you order it, which means no warehouse of unsold stock and nothing being written off and binned at the end of a season.

Printed in Stillorgan, delivered locally. Parts are made in Dublin and shipped from Dublin. For Irish customers that's a short delivery leg instead of an international freight route with a factory at the other end.

PLA first. Where a part doesn't need the heat or impact resistance of PETG, we print it in PLA — a plant-derived, industrially compostable material. We'll tell you when a tougher plastic is genuinely the right call rather than defaulting to it.

Printers running on renewable electricity

3D printing is an electricity business. A printer that runs for fourteen hours to make one part is drawing power for every one of those hours, so where that power comes from matters more than almost anything else we do.

Our workshop is on a 100% renewable electricity plan. Every unit we draw from the grid is matched with a unit of certified renewable generation — Irish wind, solar and other renewable sources — through Guarantee of Origin certificates, the EU scheme that tracks and verifies where electricity is generated.

To be precise about how this works: once electricity is on the national grid it's pooled from every source, so nobody can honestly claim the specific electrons running their printers came from a wind turbine. What certification does guarantee is that our consumption is matched unit-for-unit with renewable generation, and that our money funds renewable projects on the Irish grid rather than fossil generation.

What we don't claim

We're not carbon neutral, we don't sell offsets, and not every parcel is plastic-free. Plastic filament is still plastic. What we can say is that our power is matched with certified renewable generation, our boxed orders are packed in paper, our boxes get reused, and we don't produce anything nobody asked for.

Supporting young Irish makers

3D printing is at its best when it puts capability in the hands of people who couldn't otherwise afford it. When a student team, a school project or a community group is short on material rather than short on ideas, we'd rather the filament was on their bench than on our shelf.

Heron Labs — Agami river-monitoring robot

In July 2026 we donated PETG filament to Heron Labs, a Dublin-based student team developing Agami, a semi-autonomous river-monitoring vessel, through Patch — Ireland's accelerator for young technologists and entrepreneurs.

Agami travels downstream with the current, collecting continuous GPS-linked readings for nitrate, conductivity, turbidity and water temperature, and transmitting them live over LTE. Fixed-point sampling shows conditions at a handful of spots; Agami fills in the stretches between them, which makes it far easier to narrow down where agricultural runoff and other non-point source pollution is entering a river.

The team was 3D printing Agami's hull, sensor mounts and internal components, and needed PETG for its toughness and water resistance. We supplied the filament and they collected it from our Dublin location the same day they asked.

It's a good example of why we keep material aside for projects like this: a couple of rolls of filament is a small thing for us, and it's the difference between a prototype existing and not existing for a student team.

See what they're building: heronlabs.ie

Working on something worthwhile?

If you're a student team, school, college society, community group or non-profit working on a project that needs 3D printed parts or filament, tell us about it. We can't say yes to everything — we're one workshop — but we set material aside for this and we'd rather it went to good use.

Email info@printin3d.ie with what you're building, what you need and when you need it. Dublin-based teams can usually collect the same day.

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