As many know, the future is full of innovations, new ways of thinking and doing things. 3D-printing has become more and more popular within this century, people have started even printing cars! With 3D printing we should be aware or take precaution. A new study finds that some newly printed plastics may emerge with traces of dangerous chemicals.

A bio-engineer at the University of California, wanted to measure tiny zebra fish eggs and newly hatched baby fish, when she used a 3D-printer, many eggs did not hatch and the fish that did were sick. The bio-engineer Shirin Oskui, was aware her regular plastic lab ware never has harmed her fish before, suggesting it has the be the 3D-printer.

William Grover and Shirin Oskui both further investigated and found that processes inside some of the 3-D printers actually leave traces of toxic chemicals on the finished/final object. This was a huge discovery, because there are no strict rules for safety when comparing 3-D printing to a manufacturing plant. The product could be successfully printed out but that does not mean it is deemed safe.

The researchers performed an experiment and made three small disks with each 3-D printer, they placed each disk into its own dish along with 30 newly laid zebrafish eggs. As a control they placed zebrafish eggs in dishes with no plastic disks. Once the team monitored both the control group and testing group, they found that about 80% of fish in the control groups survived but fish in the testing group had some health problems and only 60% survived. Also every fish in the remaining dishes died. Those in the test group that died off, were eggs and fish hatched exposed to plastic made by stereolithography 3-D printing (Society for Science). The researched went as far to clean the finished object after it was printed, but the toxins remained which they have believed poisoned and killed the fish.

Thankfully the researchers found a cure to the problem. They recognized light made the ink into a hard plastic, and reasoned the more light applied should transform any ink leftover into a safe solid. The researchers tested this theory, and came to the conclusion that since 60% of fish survived at least a week when light was applied, that the light should get rid of the toxins.

This was definitely an interesting read, and does require additional research. I looked for more research on this topic, but could only find this article. In the future, more studies should be done on this topic. It truly raises the question of what regulations have we put on 3-D printing? Has technology moved so quickly and changed so fast that we still have yet to set concrete safety procedures and rules when using 3-D printers? This still remains unknown. Little is known about to toxicity of 3-D printed objects.

Works Cited:

https://student.societyforscience.org/article/some-3-d-printing-can-leave-toxic-taint

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.estlett.5b00249

http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/tuljtip17&div=10&g_sent=1&collection=journals

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