Category Archives: Trimatis

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The Avengers Wrap-up Their Mission: Our End Game

  By pvc5239 • April 28, 2019 , , ,

So we’re wrapping up our work here in BiSci and with our partnership with Trimatis. We had recently just had an awesome time presenting our whole project with our poster down in Gaige lobby. Our goal for our work with Trimatis was to create a system that would help collect plastic bottles of the type 1 variant as well as plastic scrap from 3D printing project. We had accomplished this by working with two other teams to help collect bottles and spreading the word across campus about our cause. With our efforts, we had collected approximately 150+ bottles just in Gaige building. This is a massive step towards Trimatis’s and our goal in doing our part to help save this planet.  We hope that everyone who visited our station learned a few things about 3D printing and now sees that making an effort to help the environment doesn’t just have to be done outside in nature, but it can also be done inside and in different sorts of fields too. We hope to expand our reaches with this project into more buildings across campus and hope you all continue supporting our cause. And with that said, even though this may be our End Game, for now, we will continue to strive for our home here on planet Earth.

Peter Chu

Collection Team – Trimatis

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It’s a Wrap!

  By Tiffany Nguyen • April 26, 2019 , , ,

It’s time to say bye to Green is the New Black!

Please enjoy this video that outs together what we did through out this semester!

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1PxFxGjSjo7q5aUHIjXFNMplmCRl5vCWX

It is finally the end of the semester!  As the semester comes to an end, it is time to wrap up what we did this semester for our EACAP project.  Our team (Green is the New Black) worked closely with an organization on the Penn State Berks campus called Trimatis.  Trimatis is a startup organization founded by Dr. Marietta Scanlon and two current Penn State Berks students: Tito Orjih and Jason Lehrer.  They decided to use sustainability to connect education and innovative technology together. For their current project, they are looking to turn 3D printing sustainable.  3D printing is often trial and error, which means that most of the time things that are 3D printed end up as waste. The founders of Trimatis came up with the idea to use plastic bottles as filament in order to reduce the amount of waste actually being produced.  For this project, they needed empty grade one plastic bottles. They then needed a marketing team, implementation team, and data collection team in order to help them with a trial run of the project.
Green is the New Black decided to be the marketing team.  This meant that our job was to raise awareness about the new initiative around Penn State Berks campus.  Since it is a new project, only one building, Gaige, was designated as the trial run location. Here, we posted flyers designed by our team on bulletin boards relating to Trimatis and their initiative.  Then we created posters to place on the collection bins meant for the plastic bottles. These posters explained what kind of bottles Trimatis was looking for that the students around campus could then learn about in order to contribute.  Finally we made an LED slide to put on the big TV in Gaige. But, we ran into a problem. People were putting regular trash in our collection bins instead of just plastic bottles. To correct this problem, we moved the poster to a more visible location and added examples of the types of bottles we were looking for to the posters.  This seemed to pay off because the plastic bottles starting piling up. The final component of our marketing job was to create a video for the Trimatis website which showed exactly what we did for the project.
We as a team were amazed to learn that this was a student created organization. We also think that this idea of recycling bottles to be used as 3D filament is a very creative idea that could make a large impact on innovation for the future. We never would have thought before about what 3D printing could do for the environment.This organization taught us a lot about things that we normally wouldn’t have been exposed to. We were very glad to be a part of this startup organization, and we hope that they continue to collect plastic bottles from other buildings on campus so they can get an even greater result than they got during the semester we worked with them.
Many people seem to think that with a limited amount of time on their hands between things such as school, work, and family, that they simply do not have any extra time to spend on helping the environment.  However, for anyone interested in environmental protection, we are here to tell you that you don’t need to use up any more than as much as a few seconds a day on helping our planet thrive. As a group who dealt directly with the repurposing and reusing of waste, we believe that if just a few more people could help spread the word, we could use the 6 R’s to clean up our only home- Earth– one bottle at a time.  If there were more collection bins throughout the country, we as a community could repurpose so much more plastic into 3D printing filament.  This filament can then be used to create so many more things rather than most of it just ending up at some landfill doing nobody any good. So take the time, learn more about Trimatis, and help out your environment today!

 

 

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Cool Guys Out :(

  By Daniel Althouse • April 25, 2019 , , ,

Today was the last day of class for The Cewl Guys 101.

Overall we had a great time being apart of the Trimatis Team.

We were team implementation and we were to collect the material fro other teams to produce data. We went to target and bought 2 trash cans and strategically placed them in Gaige technology building. We placed one can near the main entrance and the second  near the stair going upstairs at the far end of Gaige. Once we placed the cans our main job was complete. The other part of the project was blast fishing research, and we found many interesting thing doing that. All msot important, blast fishing is illegal!!

The second thing we did was we collected boxes for placement in different classrooms in Gaige to collect scrap from 3D printing. Basically this gave of something to do since our implementation was complete.

Thanks for letting us be apart of the class and have a great time as a class and a team.

Thanks again,

Daniel, Angus, Dorian, Kevin

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Making Progress!

  By Savannah Byrnes • March 27, 2019 , ,

Hi guys! This past week we have made a lot of progress with our posters. We finalized our designs and got them approved by the supervisor of the Trimatis initiative. We printed out our three different designs for the posters to go on the bins where the bottles will be placed in as well as to be hung around the bulletin boards around the Gaige Building. The posters that are going on the bins try and get the attention of people who are passing by in attempt to get them to throw away their bottles in our bins. The posters that are going on the boards are to inform everyone about our initiative and what we are trying to accomplish. We went to hang all of our posters last Tuesday around the Gaige building. We can’t wait to see how many bottles we will be able to get for 3D printing!

 

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The Avenger Assemble and Plan There Actions

  By Dennys Chocano Castillo • March 14, 2019 , , ,

So, today our group worked on the outline for the paper. Also once the bins are in place, we will be checking the bins twice a week emptying them if needed on the first check on Wednesdays. The second check will be done on Fridays and the bins will be emptied no matter the amount in the bins. We will most likely be recording the amount of bottles gathered in an excel sheet.

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Checking In!

  By Tiffany Nguyen • March 14, 2019 , , ,

Hi Everyone!

The ladies on Green Is The New Black met today at the library! We created our outline for the research component of the EACAP Project. Our environmental issue topic is nuclear and radiation accidents and how they relate to nuclear energy. We focused on the overall issue, causes, consequences, new stories regarding the issue, books and films relating to the issue, and solutions. We will keep you guys updated!

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The Avengers: Mission Briefing

  By pvc5239 • February 7, 2019 , ,

Just a quick update for you all. Our team has met up with Prof. Scanlon, who will be overseeing us through this project, along with the two other teams, ‘Cewl Guys 101’ and the girls of ‘Green is the New Black, who will also be talking this project together with us. In most recent years, the 3D printing trend has hit the world by storm. However, 3D printing is a very big waste producing activity. Most items that are printed are used as prototypes that are looked to be improved on and are thrown out right away, or if the printing process messes up then the whole product is thrown out! So together with Prof. Scanlon, we divided the responsibilities of the project to help reduce the wastes being produced by 3D printing between the three groups. The ‘Cewl Guys 101’ will be handling the implementation of recycling cans to gather plastic to be made and reused into 3D printing filament. The ‘Green is The New Black’ girls will be handling the public relations side of the project to get the information about this project out there to the public. And finally, there’s us, ‘The Avengers’. Our mission will be to gather the plastics from the bins and track the data and statistics of what goes through those recycling bins once they’re implemented! This will all be happening on our very own campus here at Penn State Berks, in the Gaige building. This will be a great testing ground for our project to see how effective this idea will be and, hopefully with the right results, this concept can be applied to other places with access to 3D printers to help lessen the wastes it produces!

Peter Chu, Antonio Agudio, and Dennys Chocano Castillo

-‘The Avengers’

 

 

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Searching for Sustainability

  By Tiffany Nguyen • February 6, 2019 , , ,

We are working with Trimatis and two other groups to find a sustainable way to 3D print. Most of the time a 3D printer is used to make a prototype and ends up in the garbage or the result is not as imagined then ends up in the garbage. 3D printing is costly, depending on the filament and size of the object, and a lot of trash is generated. With Trimatis, we are hoping to find a new way to 3D print. We want to use #1 PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic bottles as filament for 3D printing. So many empty plastic bottles are generated every day at Penn State Berks by students and faculty and we should put use to it. This organization is at the very first stage and we are so excited to help them grow and experiment! We will be the marketing team. We will be letting Penn State Berks know about Trimatis and the goals of the organization. We will do everything we can to persuade people to participate. We will keep you guys updated!

Until next time,

Tiffany, Savannah, and Maisie

Green is the New Black