We present SustainaPrint, a system for integrating eco-friendly filaments into 3D printing without compromising structural integrity. While biodegradable and recycled 3D printing filaments offer environmental benefits, there is a trade-off in using them as they may suffer from degraded or unpredictable mechanical properties, which can limit their use in load-bearing applications. SustainaPrint addresses this by strategically assigning eco-friendly and standard filaments to different regions of a multi-material print—reinforcing the areas that are most likely to break with stronger material while maximizing the use of sustainable filament elsewhere. As eco-friendly filaments often do not come with technical datasheets, we also introduce a low-cost, at-home mechanical testing toolkit that enables users to evaluate filament strength before deciding if they want to use that filament in our pipeline. We validate SustainaPrint through real-world fabrication and mechanical testing, demonstrating its effectiveness across a range of functional 3D printing tasks.
SustainaPrint can be applied to a wide range of everyday items, including reinforced hooks, plant pots, bottle openers, headphone stands, and phone stands. Our system enables structurally sound designs that use strong filament only where necessary, minimizing virgin plastic usage. For example, hooks are reinforced at mounting and hanging points, standing plant pots have reinforced bases and leg junctions, and bottle openers have strong material assigned to regions under maximum bending stress. Phone and headphone stands are reinforced at cantilevered hooks or cradles to ensure balance and longevity. Prints made with 80% biodegradable filament retain statistically significantly greater strength compared to those made entirely from recycled filament.
@inproceedings{Perroni-Scharf:2025:SP,
author = "Maxine Perroni-Scharf and Jennifer Xiao and Cole Paulin and Zhi Ray Wang and Ticha Sethapakdi and Muhammad Abdullah and Patrick Baudisch and Stefanie Mueller",
title = "SustainaPrint: Making the Most of Eco-Friendly Filaments",
booktitle = "The 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '25)",
year = "2025",
month = "September 28-October 1",
address = "Busan, Republic of Korea",
publisher = "ACM",
url = "https://doi.org/10.1145/3746059.3747640"
}