Upcycling of Abandoned Beehives!!
Upcycling abandoned beehives to make new products can reuse the useful materials in old beehives and produce less trash. As known that bees leave their beehive in these following situations like insufficient replenishment, frequent unboxing and environmental issues. Then the beehive will be abandoned and will have no use left. In this project, a piece of honeycomb was collected from abandoned beehive and melted in order to extract beeswax. The potential of the extracted beeswax for replacing plastic to produce fillers of 3D pens was studied. Natural materials like seashell, rosin, soy bean and coffee ground were tested as ingredients of 3D printing materials. Finally, the potential of using extracted beeswax in 3D printing was confirmed. Beeswax has a low melting point at around 64°C and solidify quickly at room temperature. The high plasticity of this natural wax fulfills the criteria of 3D printing materials. Biodegradable wastes, like coffee grounds and soy bean grounds were tested as additives for reducing the beeswax content. Sea shell grounds were eliminated from the tested list as its filaments broke into small pieces of brittle fragments during the production process. 5% and 10% of these additives were the optimal formula for making long filaments. Yet, the thin filaments made by pure beeswax were not strong enough, filaments of selected beeswax-soy bean grounds were further strengthened by mixing with 5% or 10% rosin. Among the four different ratios of Beeswax: Soy bean grounds: Rosin (9:1:0.5 / 9:1:1 / 9.5:0.5:0.5 / 9.5:0.5:1), filaments in the ratio 9.5:0.5:0.5 demonstrated better flexibility, higher tensile strength and compressive strength, thus B9.5:S0.5:R0.5 was the final formula of biodegradable beeswax 3D filament.