PLA Recycling and Forgely's Commitment to Sustainable 3D Printing

Every 3D printer owner knows the feeling. You walk over to your machine, and there it is — a failed print. Maybe the bed adhesion gave out at hour six. Maybe a support structure turned into spaghetti. Whatever happened, you're left holding a chunk of plastic that took hours to create and serves no purpose at all.

Multiply that by the millions of printers running worldwide, and you start to see the scale of the problem. 3D printing is an incredible technology, but it generates waste. And as a family business built around this industry, that's something we think about constantly at Forgely.

The Waste Nobody Talks About

The 3D printing community loves to share their wins — the perfect prints, the clever designs, the satisfying time-lapses. What doesn't get shared as much is the other side: the failed prints, the support material, the purge towers, the test prints, the spools that went bad because they absorbed too much moisture.

PLA is marketed as "biodegradable," and technically that's true — in industrial composting facilities that maintain specific temperature and humidity conditions over extended periods. In a landfill? PLA behaves a lot like any other plastic. It sits there. For a long time.

That gap between PLA's marketing and its reality is something our industry needs to reckon with. And at Forgely, we'd rather be part of the solution than pretend the problem doesn't exist.

How We Got Here

Forgely started as a family operation — Bill and Tyler Davis, father and son, building something together in Roy, Utah. From the beginning, the vision was bigger than just selling filament. We wanted to build a company that serves the 3D printing community in a way that the big online retailers can't: with real relationships, real expertise, and real accountability.

Part of that accountability means looking honestly at the environmental footprint of our industry. We manufacture our own filament. We sell over 600 SKUs. We're deeply embedded in the lifecycle of these materials — from raw pellet to finished spool to (eventually) waste. If anyone should be thinking about what happens at the end of that lifecycle, it's us.

What We're Doing About It

We won't pretend we've solved PLA recycling. Nobody has — it's a genuinely hard problem. PLA can be mechanically recycled (ground up, re-pelletized, and re-extruded), but the process requires careful sorting by color and material type, and the resulting filament often has degraded properties compared to virgin material.

What we are doing is taking concrete steps toward making our operation — and our community — more sustainable:

• Minimizing our own production waste: When you manufacture filament, there's startup waste, color transition waste, and material from quality control testing. We're continuously refining our processes to reduce how much material gets scrapped during production runs.
• Proper material handling: Filament that absorbs moisture becomes unprintable and gets thrown away. By educating our customers on proper storage and selling filament that's been handled correctly from production to purchase, we reduce the amount that ends up in the trash.
• Exploring take-back and recycling pathways: We're actively investigating ways to collect failed prints and waste filament from our local community. The logistics and economics of small-scale PLA recycling are challenging, but we believe local collection is a necessary first step.
• Supporting material innovation: As new recyclable and genuinely compostable materials enter the market, we're committed to carrying them and helping our customers make informed choices about material selection.

Why This Matters for the Community

3D printing is still a young industry. The norms, practices, and infrastructure around it are still being established. That means the choices companies like Forgely make right now — about waste, about materials, about how we operate — help set the direction for the entire community.

We talk to our customers every day in our Roy store. We see the passion people have for this technology. We see kids learning engineering through 3D printing. We see small business owners prototyping products. We see artists creating things that couldn't exist any other way.

All of that is worth protecting. And protecting it means being honest about the environmental cost and working to reduce it — not someday, but now.

The Bigger Picture

Sustainability in 3D printing isn't just about recycling. It's about the whole system:

• Print smarter: Better designs use less material. Infill optimization, proper support settings, and dialing in your printer all reduce waste.
• Choose materials thoughtfully: Not every print needs to be PLA. Sometimes a more durable material means the part lasts longer and doesn't need to be reprinted.
• Buy from companies that care: When you support businesses that take sustainability seriously, you're voting with your wallet for a better industry.
• Don't throw away failed prints: Keep them. As recycling infrastructure develops — and it will — those scraps will have value.

At Forgely, we're not claiming to have all the answers. We're a family business in Roy, Utah, doing our best to build something that lasts — not just as a company, but as a contribution to a community and an industry we genuinely love.

The path toward sustainable 3D printing is long, and we're walking it one step at a time. We'd love for you to walk it with us.