ABQ Times

Fiona Bell, a postdoctoral fellow at The University of New Mexico School of Engineering, has developed a sustainable 3D printing recipe book. The project, titled “Biomaterial Recipes for 3D Printing: A Cookbook of Sustainable and Extrudable Bio-Pastes,” features recipes utilizing bio-waste materials such as orange peels, sawdust, and tree leaves.

Bell’s work emphasizes sustainable alternatives to plastic used in 3D printing, with a focus on small-scale printers accessible to consumers. “While the recipes provide a sustainable alternative to plastics, the entire cookbook in and of itself is a powerful artifact because it allows people to engage with these sustainable materials that might seem high tech or unattainable in a very natural and accessible way,” Bell stated.

In her research, Bell utilized local waste streams, incorporating resources such as cottonwood leaves from UNM's campus, woodshop sawdust, and restaurant waste eggshells. These components act as fillers in the recipes, with stabilizers like sand or eggshells to provide object stability, binders such as wheat flour to maintain cohesion, and liquids to create the paste.

Completed 3D prints can be waterproofed with beeswax or polished with vegetable oil. The book details decomposition timelines for printed items such as plant pots and birdhouses, and covers lessons learned from failed designs.

“Most 3D printing focuses on plastics, whereas all of these are made from different bio-waste streams that exist in our local community,” Bell stated. “We’ve been able to look at our local communities and think about what materials are produced, what goes to waste and how we can reuse those wastes and give them second lives before returning them to the earth.”

The innovative recipe book earned Bell the Best Pictorial Award at the ACM TEI Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction in Bordeaux, France, alongside colleagues Camila Friedman-Gerlicz and Leah Buechley.

Bell brings a background in Creative Technology, Design, and Mechanical Engineering to the Hand and Machine Lab, which is led by Buechley and studies the intersection of technology, materials, and culture to make advanced technologies accessible and culturally responsive.