this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
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"rules" are there for a reason. But hey, it's your health and safety, do whatever you want.
Yes but common sense is also there for a reason, I would absolutely trust this material to handle very light duty tasks like this. There is a difference between following rules within the boundaries of common sense and spouting them off in any tangentially related scenario without having done any testing yourself or even seeing the product in action. There is simply no way to definitively say "this is a bad idea" without doing microbe tests and comparing it to baseline levels after a period. I think people tend to jump on the not food safe bandwagon a little too readily in this community and I'd rather not see this place become like an average reddit hobby ground
I'd quadruple upvote this if I could.
Yeah there is a way to say "this is a bad idea" without microbes tests. This is a bad idea, plain and simple. Just because you want to say otherwise, doesn't mean you are right. It's simply not food safe.
Oh you're being a wowser.
So food safe is a phrase averaging a series of concepts. I agree it is tremendously unwise to say eat soup repeatedly out of a 3d printed bowl because of inability to clean it properly and leaching of contaminates.
It's probably not very dangerous to eat peanuts once out of a 3d printed bowl because there's no liquid to leech shit through and you're not relying on washing it.
you need to think about the underlying mechanisms of things. If you don't know anything then abundant caution is wise, but you should probably couple it with humility.
Leeching through solids is the only real concern here and I probably get orders of magnitude more heavy metals from my tap water (which are still safe limits) or VOCs from the plastic decaying slowly in the soil that grows my veggies (all soil on earth is contaminated at this point, but I grow next to farmers and lemme tell ya nobody hates the environment like farmers).
I know way more than you realize. As I said before - you do you. It won't be me who ends up drinking plastic.
It’s interesting that previously you said bacteria and now you say plastic. You know a lot, so enlighten the rest of us. What’s the concern here? As others have pointed out, coffee hoppers are rarely cleaned by most people, and this never gets wet and mostly handles dry whole beans with a little bit of dry bean dust. PLA is theoretically food safe as a material itself (and used in plastic utensils and containers). What are we missing? Please explain thoroughly in a single long post, not a quip because too many of us aren’t understanding from short quips.
Why should I? So I get even more combative comments from people that don't know anything and go "nu uuuh I have done this and I'm fine"?
First of all, I didn't say "bacteria" only. I said that there is a difference between injection molding food safe plastics, and 3d printing them. The difference is huge in the terms of surface quality, with a 3d prints' layerlines being a great place for bacteria to form. And you don't need to put wet stuff into it, to make it form bacteria. Simply put, injection molding makes a uniform surface - by the design of the process, during injection the plastic gets squished to the walls of the mold, with incredible pressure (700kgf on some "hobby" machines, like the Buster Beagle, imagine what a real, few tonne press can do). The process of 3d printing naturally lacks that, leading to a porous end result.
The process of 3d printing introduces contaminates into the plastic. The hotend is basically a huge chemical hazard. Especially if you don't just print PLA. No amount of cleaning it can change that - burnt bits of plastic, especially on brass, are impossible to remove.
The process of printing also coats the model with tiny particles of plastic that are simply harmful to you when ingested.
Add in the fact, that PLA has other additives that are not food safe, and that you need an actual, certified roll to be "food safe". Most colorings aren't that. Most strength additives aren't that.
Overall there are countless reasons to keep 3d printing away from your kitchen. It's not "going to be fine", it's a health hazard.
I'll repeat myself for a third time, and stop replying to angry people here - you do you. I wanted to warn people who might not know the risk, who are not in the plastics business. I'm not here to engage in discussions on how to bend health and safety for a project that is not worth it.
Chill out about your microbes already. The world is full of them and other micro-organisms that don't harm you.