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Fryer Oil Into Things, Why Not?

Regia Marinho
3 min readFeb 13, 2020

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Let’s make a deal… I draw something

Digital art. © R. Marinho

And you make it!

With cooking oil and a 3D printer.

Because you can!

Recently researchers at the University of Toronto found a way to turn oil from a deep fryer into a light-sensitive plastic for 3D printers.

There are lots of reasons not to eat greasy deep-fried fast food.

And the challenges involved with disposing of used cooking oil that result in clogged sewers.

Used cooking oil is a major global environmental problem.

So, researchers under Sympson, an environmental chemist and director of the Environmental NMR Centre at U of T Scarborough…decide to have a solution.

“We found that McDonald’s waste cooking oil has excellent potential as a 3D printing resin” ~Sympson.

In order to turn cooking oil into usable resin it requires a straightforward chemical process.

Simpson and his team used a straightforward one-step chemical process in the lab, using about one liter of used cooking oil to make 420 milliliters of resin.

The resin was then used to print a plastic butterfly.

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Regia Marinho
Regia Marinho

Written by Regia Marinho

I publish tech, art, food, AI, AR, architecture, interior design, fashion, and photography articles. Ideas to inspire the world through art. @regiaart

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