A participatory approach for determining appropriate strategies for managing and recycling plastic waste using 3D printing technologies

There are considerable amounts of plastic waste generated in university campuses which led to seriously consider achieving sustainability with waste recycling. Digital manufacturing technologies are offering approaches to convert plastic waste into materials to produce new products. There is a need to identify appropriate strategies for recycling plastic waste. This paper aims at identifying them in a university campus using a participatory approach. The Delphi technique is utilized as a group judgement in the workshop conducted at Assiut university campus. The specific findings of this paper include that university community has identified litter bins, educational models, and lighting fixtures as the most popular 3D-printed products made from recycled plastic bottles. When determining the affordable prices of recycled 3D-printed products, the time spent creating them and the amount produced were found to be the most important factors among the top five. On the university campus, the top five locations for collecting plastic waste were found to be next to sales outlets and on pedestrian paths at road intersections. Regarding the collection of PET plastic bottles, empty bottles and clean bottles were the two most preferred conditions out of the top five. Five locations are identified for mobile-lab awareness tours.